_____________

Editor’s note: The following is a guest post by Ben Stein. Stein is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer living in Beverly Hills and Malibu.

Like the distinguished public servant Dominique Strauss-Kahn, I am a friend to all women, even the ones who didn’t fully appreciate my American Spectator column on the scurrilous charges filed against the former IMF chief. I’d like to extend an olive branch to those misguided members of the fairer sex by sharing some advice on the proper way to go about getting raped if you expect public intellectuals to take your charges seriously.

Ladies, my humble thoughts:

1.) Ensure that your rapist has a criminal history.

Should you find yourself being raped by a man with a long history of sexual abuse, take a moment to perform a criminal background check. This can be done with most modern smartphones as long as your hands are free.

No criminal record? In all likelihood, his sexually violent past is mere gossip and he is not a threat. You are engaged in a consensual sex act. Carry on.

2.) Find out your rapist’s profession.

Is your rapist an economist? If so, you are not being raped. As I asked in my last column, “Can anyone tell me any economists who have been convicted of violent sex crimes? Can anyone tell me of any heads of nonprofit international economic entities who have ever been charged and convicted of violent sexual crimes?”

As an economist, I can personally attest to the fact that economists do not rape. In fact, if I were to slip on a ski mask and surprise you in the dark alley by my house that I happen to know is rarely patrolled by police, rest assured, you’d be completely safe in my gloved hands.

3.) Choose a tall, muscular rapist with a weapon.

An unarmed fat man over the age of 50 cannot rape. Sure, some will try, but it beggars belief to suggest a gentleman like Dominique Strauss-Kahn could succeed at orally raping a feisty young chambermaid.

If you intend to report a rape, ensure that the perpetrator is armed with a knife or gun. He should also be fairly young and strikingly tall with lean, powerful muscles and rock hard abs. If he is short and pudgy, it is likely that you have consented to sex.

4.) Your rapist must not have travel plans.

Do not bother reporting your “rapist” unless his intention is to remain within the general vicinity of your encounter. If he has booked a flight scheduled to take off just a few hours after your tryst, his alibi is nearly unimpeachable. It is doubtful that you have been raped.

5.) Ensure that your rapist is no one noteworthy.

Accomplished men with recognizable faces–men like me–do not deserve to be treated like common criminals when a mere pleb makes allegations of sexual misconduct. Generally speaking, the allegations should not be made at all when men of great import are involved. Take a moment to consider whether you’re misinterpreting a consensual rendezvous as something more unsavory.

6.) Be an economist.

If you intend to be raped, make certain you are a professional working in a field populated exclusively by people of unassailable character and credibility. Housekeeping is not such a field. As I explained earlier this week, “I have had hotel maids that were complete lunatics, stealing airline tickets from me, stealing money from me, throwing away important papers, stealing medications from me.”

Play it safe and study to become an economist.

________

Editor’s note: GFY, Ben Stein. And yes, this is obviously satire.

Originally published at NewsReal

____________

The size of her breasts, the shape of her backside, and of course, her name. These are some of the details Le Monde, the French “journal de référence,” and its subsidiary Le Post published about the woman who says IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn groped her genitals and forced her to perform oral sex on him in a room at the Sofitel near Times Square.

France-Soir described the cut of her hotel maid uniform and how good she looks for a woman in her thirties, while France’s RMC radio reported that Strauss-Kahn’s attorneys were surprised by how “unattractive” she is.

And a bevy of friends and supporters rallied to the defense of Strauss-Kahn, a leading figure in the French Socialist Party, hoping to discredit his accuser lest she derail their plans for him to oust Sarkozy in the 2012 presidential elections.

A photo of the alleged victim is all over Twitter, and a Facebook profile in her supposed name was deleted shortly after links to it began to appear on blogs and social media sites. It’s unclear whether the Facebook profile was hers or a hoax account set up to smear her name. Today, another name and photo are circulating in the French media. It doesn’t matter if they get it right–the effect is the same. Just as they did to the accusers in the Julian Assange rape case, the “pro-woman” Left has launched a vicious campaign to terrorize and shame this woman into silence.

The despicable Bernard-Henri Lévy, author of the “Free Roman Polanski” petition, called Strauss-Kahn “a friend to women” who “bears no resemblance to this monster, this caveman, this insatiable and malevolent beast.” Henri-Levy tapped into his own inner monster by assailing the accuser on his blog and at the Daily Beast:

I do not know—but, on the other hand, it would be nice to know, and without delay—how a chambermaid could have walked in alone, contrary to the habitual practice of most of New York’s grand hotels of sending a “cleaning brigade” of two people, into the room of one of the most closely watched figures on the planet.

“Bernard-Henri is scandalized that a mere chambermaid can get a ‘great’ man like Strauss-Kahn in trouble with the law merely by credibly accusing him of sexual assault,” writes Jonah Goldberg. Decades of carefully constructed class narratives are tossed out the window in the service of the Left’s political goals. The downtrodden worker is exalted only so long as it’s convenient, only so long as she remembers her place in the power structure.

Commenters at the American “feminist” blog Jezebel smell a “honey trap.”

Why would someone throw away a decades long career and reputation for something they had no chance of getting away with.

Well, if the Sarko campaign offered the maid $100k, she might lie about it at the station and then disappear to live someplace else.

This almost NEVER happens. You almost NEVER hear tales of high level politicians sexually assaulting and raping random women like maids, waitresses .

An accusation does not a conviction make, and I’d argue it’s important to see every angle before making some snap judgment about anyone here. Especially when political powers are involved. There’s nothing wrong with saying, “This smells fishy.” Especially when, well, it does.

Meanwhile, French politicos are in full damage control mode:

Socialist Party MP Jean-Marie Le Guen:

Seduction, yes, but no way would he use constraint or violence. A certain number of facts, and certain aspects of the story we are hearing from the press, make this not credible.

Michelle Sabban, Strauss-Kahn supporter and senior councilor for the greater Paris region:

I am convinced it is an international conspiracy … It’s not like him. Everyone knows that his weakness is seduction, women. That’s how they got him.

Socialist MEP Gilles Savary:

“Everyone knows it’s true to say that Dominique Strauss-Kahn is a hedonist (libertin), who is distinguished from others in that he doesn’t try to hide it.” The problem, wrote Savary, is American prudery. “In puritanical America, where everything is shaped by unforgiving Protestantism, they tolerate white-collar crime more than they do pleasures of the flesh.” Mind you, this is DSK’s flesh, not that of the chambermaid whom he allegedly assaulted. Maybe she was just too Protestant to enjoy M. Savary’s idea of pleasure.

Even Christine Boutin, head of France’s Christian Democratic party weighed in (perhaps fearing similar scandals in her own party):

I really believe that somebody set a trap for Dominique Strauss-Kahn to fall into… That he could be taken in like that seems astounding, so he must have been trapped.

And on it goes as Strauss-Kahn’s allies in the media and political world scramble to paint him as a ladies man snared by an international conspiracy, the “Great Seducer” rather than a sexual predator. They will chip away at his accuser’s credibility and dignity, doing whatever it takes to rescue their anointed Socialist savior from what the New York Times called “tawdry allegations.” She is nothing to them when her accusations mean everything to the their political future. Strauss-Kahn’s abusive sexual history and forensic evidence be damned.

Socialists: for the women, for the underdog, for the worker … until one of them gets in the way.

Cross-posted at NewsReal.

Originally published on March 13, 2011 at NewsReal

———

In 1989, a jogger was beaten, raped, and left for dead in New York City’s Central Park.  When she arrived at the courthouse to testify, a swarm of protesters led by Al Sharpton greeted her with shouts of “whore!” and “drug addict!”

She was just a rape victim, an acceptable casualty of Sharpton’s beloved race warfare.

“It’s typical of the left to make a convicted rapist a hero,” Susan Brownmiller told an interviewer in 1975.  The feminist author was referring to the Left’s embrace of Eldridge Cleaver, the 1960s Black Panther radical who called his rape of white women “an insurrectionary act.”

And so it is decades later in Cleveland, Texas.

An 11-year-old girl suffered a brutal gang rape that began in the bedroom and bathroom of a house and ended in a filthy abandoned trailer strewn with garbage and debris. Police say the assailants forced the child to remove her clothes under threat of violence and raped her while filming the prolonged attack with a camera phone.

The child’s vaginal injuries were so severe that she told a forensic interviewer “investigators might find blood at one of the locations as proof.” A reporter who read the search warrant affidavit described the details as “too obscene to repeat.”

At least 18 men and boys were arrested, and up to 10 more suspects may be charged in the coming days. The victim is Hispanic and all of the accused are black.

Like a vulture circling carrion, New Black Panther Party leader Quanell X swooped down on the small East Texas town to devour the remains of an 11-year-old child’s innocence. The soulless race hustler attracted a standing-room-only crowd to an event in support of the accused attackers. He called his victim blaming, race baiting hate rally “What’s The Real Truth Behind The Rape Allegations?”

“I did not come here this evening to jump on an 11-year-old girl,” he insisted during remarks that questioned “why she didn’t report the attack to authorities herself.” The rally was packed with supporters of the accused men who “blamed the girl for the way she dressed or claimed she must have lied about her age.” A revolting article in the March 9th edition of the New York Times chronicled similar victim blaming by local residents who said the girl “dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s.” And a defense attorney for several of the men told a Houston Chronicle reporter that the child was “seeking attention” and “wants to be a porn star.”

Is this the best Cleveland, Texas has to offer a vulnerable young girl violated by a gang of local men?

Before Quanell X descended on the town of Cleveland, residents were experiencing heightened racial tensions due to the possible recall of three black city council members. The opportunistic, exploitative stench of his agenda belched forth from the rally Thursday night as he encouraged the community’s despicable, unconscionable questions about the 11-year-old victim’s culpability. In a move carefully orchestrated to cultivate a toxic atmosphere of doubt and blame, he “even went so far as to show reporters a scantily clad photo of her posted on Facebook.”

Further victimization of an 11-year-old rape survivor means nothing to Quanell X. She’s collateral damage, a civilian casualty in his endless quest to recruit violent criminals and their sympathizers as foot soldiers in his race war. “’She lives in another community,’ Quanell X told the gathering. ‘You mean to tell me the only men that had sex with that girl were black men, locked up in that jail?’” Proclaiming the innocence of some of those arrested, he took up a collection for their defense and attempted to whip the crowd into a frothy mix of racial resentment and hatred. “We do not want someone with a malicious racist motive to rid your community of an entire generation of black men,” he said.

From victim shaming and race baiting fabrications to politically motivated rape jokes, exaggerated statistics, and vicious smear campaigns, rape has long been an acceptable political weapon in the professional Left’s arsenal.  Victims of rape, the wrongly accused, and the damaged and disturbed people who make false allegations are all completely dispensable in the service of illuminating some larger “truth” about American imperialism or social injustice.

The horrendous false allegations of gang rape made by Tawana Brawley and Crystal Gail Mangum proved just as useful to the political Left.   Their tales of racially motivated sexual violence were carefully manipulated to advance a disturbing narrative of racial hatred–truth and justice be damned. Both women were fashioned into political dodge balls and lobbed repeatedly at the Left’s targets until, worn and battered, they found themselves discarded unceremoniously in the nearest gutter.

And now, that gutter is where an 11-year-old  Texas girl finds herself, abandoned by the feminists who spoke out about her rape but are now appallingly silent about her savaging by a prominent black activist and his depraved disciples.

———

If you rely on the Reich-wing, Tea-tard propaganda machine for your information, you probably missed the news about the sexually suggestive gift Sarah Palin received from Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio last week: pink panties!

But no worries, the unimpeachable left-wing blogosphere will bring you up to speed on all the relevant facts. Er, “facts.”

Under the headline “Sarah Palin Gets Pink Panties From Creepy Arizona Sheriff,” The Frisky‘s Jessica Wakeman shared the details of Sheriff Arpaio’s lecherous overture:

Great moments in “ewwww”: at a Tea Party rally in Phoenix, Arizona, on Friday, infamous anti-immigration Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio handed Sarah Palin a pair of pink panties. Yes, panties!

Other left-wing bloggers piled on, delivering the incisive commentary we’ve come to expect:

Reporting on “the panty package,” a TPM blogger joked, “No word on how Todd Palin reacted to the news.”

“You know your attraction to women’s underwear is a little out of control when you do things like this,” admitted explained apparent panty fetish expert Charles Johnson.

Ed Brayton, a self-identified “journalist” at ScienceBlogs wrote, “Strange women flying about from Alaska receiving pink panties is no basis for a system of government.”

“This is SO messed up…please tell me this is a joke,” said Pam Spaulding.

Name It Change It, a project of the Women’s Media Center that tracks sexist incidents in the media, called Arpaio “really damn sexist,” adding that the Sheriff’s “use of a national female politician to delploy [sic] sexism as a publicity stunt is deplorable.”

John Cole at Balloon Juice described the sheriff’s gift as “just creepy and weird” (right after posting the creepy and weird panty pic above).

And the ever classy Gawker offered this Photoshop of the governor’s meeting with Sheriff Arpaio:

So why haven’t more of us heard about the sheriff’s inappropriate, sexually charged gesture? Hmm … maybe because it never happened.

After meeting Governor Palin, Sheriff Arpaio tweeted:

Just got done welcoming Sarah Palin to our County. Had a nice chat and gave her a pair of pink underwear.

Add “pink underwear” to the moonbat mixer, blend until frothy, and BAM!: the sheriff has a creepy panty fetish.

Hey, lefties: learn to Read the Freakin’ Google (and not just when it suits your political goals). The oh-so risqué pink undergarments Arpaio hands out as souvenirs are the same ones he’s famous for selling via his charity Web site, PinkUnderwear.com, and they look an awful lot like novelty boxers (pictured on the next page):

His site explains:

When Sheriff Joe learned that Maricopa County Inmates were stealing their jailhouse whites, he had all the boxers dyed pink. Inventory control improved, so the undershirts followed – then the sheets, socks, towels, and everything down to the handcuffs.

The boxer shorts are now sold online and at charity events to raise funds for youth mentoring programs in Maricopa County.

But of course, at the mere mention of unmentionables by a conservative politician, left-wing bloggers began to work their knickers into knots, praying to the Flying Spaghetti Monster that Arpaio really did sexually harass Palin with a gift of pink lingerie. Hopes and prayers morphed into truth and facts, as often happens with this crowd, and the pink panty meme was born.

Writing at the fetid intellectual wasteland called Pandagon, Jesse Taylor delighted in using the sheriff’s tweet to analyze the psychosexual motives of the entire Tea Party Movement:

Not that I’m saying that the Tea Party may contain an incredibly disturbing psychosexual undercurrent focused on fetishizing powerful women that are still ideologically beholden to them, but f–k it, I am.

This is the sexually demeaning brand of “feminism” found at Pandagon and other left-wing feminist blogs. Souvenir boxers are an opportunity to sexualize and degrade politicians. Ideological opponents are smeared as sexual oppressors working to keep womenfolk enslaved and beholden. And the pleasure of sadism is the driving force behind conservatism.

But it’s the Tea Party Movement that contains a “disturbing psychosexual undercurrent”?

Oh, if only Tea Party women could be as enlightened as Jesse Taylor and his fellow bloggers on the Left. When will those dumb Tea Party broads get it through their thick, sexually fetishized skulls that Jesse knows what’s best for them. And he only hits because he loves.

—–

Follow me on Twitter.

Little girls in Cameroon are being betrayed by their own mothers. Using piping hot stones, women “iron” their pubescent daughters’ breasts to destroy any visible sign of budding womanhood. Some of the victims of this torture are as young as nine.

The scars are horrific.

Women say it is love that drives them to brutalize their daughters this way, that they just want to protect young girls from being raped or becoming pregnant at an early age. Instead, they end up with daughters who are both mutilated and pregnant. Not only are the girls disfigured, but many suffer infection, pain, psychological distress, and damage to the breast tissue that can cause lactation difficulties and perhaps even breast cancer.

As with female genital mutilation, girls are having their bodies violated in unthinkable ways in order to control their sexuality. Why bother to address a high teen pregnancy rate with education about sex and birth control when you can scald away the flesh from your daughter’s chest? And of course, it’s easier to blame little girls for being too enticing than it is to repair a culture in which rape and assault are prevalent.

Please watch the documentary embedded below for more on this cruelty. (Note: The video contains some nudity.)

Via The Frisky.

The next time you hear a so-called feminist demanding the passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act or exploding with outrage at the inhumanity of being forced to pay for abortion, remind her that the systematic abuse of women and girls is real. She’s just never experienced it.

Nikki Haley whupped a whole lotta good ol’ boy ass in the South Carolina GOP gubernatorial primary, trouncing her establishment opponents at the polls and leaving behind a battered pile of the state’s nastiest corruptocrats and sleazebags. And boy are they pissed.

Now, just a month after Haley’s victory, one Republican cartoonist has emerged from his gutter to dredge up the same vile race-baiting and sexism that failed to derail her primary campaign. In a cartoon published Tuesday (pictured above), Robert Ariail portrays the Indian-American gubernatorial candidate as a bikini-clad pageant queen in the first panel and a niqab-clad Muslim in the second. The cartoon explicitly echos previous race-, religion-, and gender-based attacks against Haley, a practicing Methodist raised in the Sikh tradition by her immigrant parents.

Ariail depicts Haley as a radical Muslim posing as an all American pageant contestant so she can put one over on voters. He claims that’s totally different than when State Senator Jake Knotts described Haley as “a raghead that’s ashamed of her religion trying to hide it behind being Methodist for political reasons.”

The cartoon on Ms. Haley is, I think, pretty straight forward: It contrasts her campaign’s message of open government and transparency ( which I support) with her recent closed-door meetings, her refusal to release House e-mail accounts and her explanations on consulting fees and what she did to earn them. The cartoon is neither salacious nor an ethnic or religious slur. I came up with the idea of her as “Miss Transparency” wearing the title sash and bikini and chose the burqa as the best clothing metaphor representing the opposite of transparency. The burqa is a visual metaphore I’ve used before to make similar points.

Let’s get this out of the way right now: no one in South Carolina has taken greater risks to improve government transparency than Nikki Haley. These unimaginably titillating messages that might or might not lurk in her email archives are part of a manufactured controversy, one that provided an excuse for Ariail to revive the “Nikki Haley is a slutty secret Muslim” meme with his cartoon. He continues:

It is not about Ms. Haley’s religion- after all, she was a Sikh, not a Muslim, before she became a Christian. Anyone who claims this cartoon is an ethnic or religious slur is deliberately misconstruing its simple, issue-oriented meaning.

Oh, of course. Can’t you see? The cartoon wasn’t about religion because the enlightened Mr. Ariail knows the difference between Muslims and Sikhs. That’s why he couldn’t possibly have intended his cartoon as a dog whistle to alert the state’s bigots that Nikki Haley is different and ethnic and not really one of us. And it never crossed Ariail’s mind that depicting Haley in a niqab was awfully reminiscent of the “raghead” incident (or that drawing her in a bikini next to the words “what she promises” would remind his audience of the Haley sex scandal that wasn’t).

Spare me.

There are dozens if not hundreds of simple, reliable visual metaphors to convey lack of transparency. Either Robert Ariail is the most tone deaf cartoonist in the business, or he deliberately attempted to stoke doubt about a female candidate of Indian descent in the minds of bigots. The former is unlikely. A talented two-time Pulitzer finalist like Ariail doesn’t achieve that level of success without a keen eye for subtext and nuance in politics.

Tapping into ethnic and religious bigotry is a repugnant political tactic. Fortunately, South Carolinians have proven it’s an ineffective one as well.

“That’s not Sarah Palin. It’s a man, baby!”

Is there a new Austin Powers film hitting the theaters? No, that’s just the catty sentiment in Eleanor Clift’s oh so magnanimous Newsweek column welcoming conservative women into the “feminist” fold. And Sarah Palin isn’t just any man: she’s anti-Semitic Holocaust revisionist Pat Buchanan. In drag.

Desperate to contribute something new to the earthshakingly important national conversation on whether Palin and her “mama grizzlies” are allowed to call themselves feminists, Clift offers conservative women a grudging olive branch slathered in sneering contempt:

Thirty years late to the battle for women’s rights, they’re claiming the mantle of feminism.

It’s nice they’re embracing feminism after demonizing the term for so long, and I welcome them to the arena. Let’s see if they can do for women what their sisters on the left have done since the ’70s, breaking down the barriers for women in all areas of American life including politics.

I think we know where Clift can stick that olive branch.

Clift’s phony magnanimity doesn’t begin to mask the true purpose of her column: to continue the Left’s mission to destroy Palin with hateful smears and weaponized misogyny. Using an unnamed Republican as her mouthpiece, Clift opts for a bizarre twist on the tired “Bush in a skirt” attack:

A Republican source says Palin is nothing new, she’s really Pat Buchanan in drag—the same issues except that her reality show is a lot more gripping. The media went overboard for Buchanan in 1996 when he won the New Hampshire primary, defeating establishment favorite Bob Dole. But the insurgent campaign of a former Nixon speechwriter can’t compare with the ongoing soap opera of the Palins. Bristol and Levi together again!

When I ran the Palin-as-Buchanan theory past another Republican, a woman this time, she said that was an insult to Buchanan, who is deeply serious and has thought about these issues. She doesn’t agree with his conclusions, but he rode the rocket at a moment in time, just as Palin is poised to do.

When Pat Buchanan is stuck for a column idea, he regurgitates al-Qaeda propaganda or spews Holocaust revisionism and calls it a day. Sarah Palin is a tireless supporter of Israel. Buchanan compared the “Free Gaza” flotilla passengers to civil rights protesters. Palin denounced the “vicious thugs” for their staged provocation of our ally.

Pat Buchanan’s name is nearly synonymous with Nazi apologia. He defends Nazi war criminals, lauds Hitler’s “genius,” and rants about Jewish conspiracies. His vile, anti-Semitic columns are an embarrassment to the Right. (Is it any wonder MSNBC keeps him around?)

Anyone else having trouble seeing the similarity between Palin and Buchanan?

There’s no comparison. Eleanor Clift is simply playing the Left’s Mad Libs-style smear game:

[conservative woman we hate] is [nasty conservative man] in [something that confers faux femininity]

The blanks were there; Clift just filled them in:

[Sarah Palin] is [Pat Buchanan] in [drag]

This is an insult used time and again to delegitimize women on the Right by turning them into mannish faux women. Nikki Haley is “little more than Mark Sanford in drag,” Carly Fiorina is “Dick Cheney in a skirt,” and Sarah Palin is all of the above and more: George Bush in a skirt, Dan Quayle with an up-do, and of course, Dick Cheney in lipstick.

See the pattern?

Only “progressive” women qualify as Real Women; Palin, Haley, and other “mama grizzlies” are merely masquerading as female by decorating themselves with skirts, up-dos, lipstick and other trappings of womanhood. The goal of this misogynist attack is to dehumanize the target by casting her out of her very gender.

Clift takes this strategy one step further by smearing Palin as a sub par transvestite version of one of the most detestable men on the American Right. She pretends to welcome Palin into the leftist sisterhood, hoping Palin will take the bait and subject herself to a good ol’ fashioned hazing.

Not. Gonna. Happen.

Sarah Palin and the nation’s conservative women aren’t looking for Eleanor Clift’s approval. We don’t need permission to use the feminist label that’s been trampled and abused by the Left during their multi-decade assault on women via Big Daddy Government. And we’re not fooled by thinly veiled contempt couched in condescending acceptance of mama grizzlies.

So, Ms. Clift, forgive us if we don’t accept a slimy little olive branch from the person who once named Cindy Sheehan “Woman of the Year.” We’re doing just fine without you.

Update: Doug Brady at Conservatives4Palin.com reminds us, “This isn’t the first time the Palin-obsessed Clift has tried to tie her to Buchanan.” Read the whole thing at C4P.

Mark Morford, misogynist Obama worshipper

Mark Morford’s San Francisco Chronicle column is what a leftist’s diary might look like — if that leftist was a horny 14-year-old with a man-sized crush on Obama and a predilection for verbally abusing conservative women. Hmm. Scratch that. Morford’s column is exactly what a leftist’s diary would look like.

You might recognize Morford as the drooling Obama fetishist who proclaimed candidate Obama a “rare kind of attuned being” and a “Lightworker.” Or perhaps you remember his enlightened progressive description of “docile doormat” Laura Bush as “the ideal Republican wife: Prim, sexless, nearly useless, lets the men do the real thinkin.”

So really, who better to appoint himself this week’s Grand Arbiter of True Feminism?

Finding few reasons to gush about the Obama presidency, Morford’s current mission is to expose the “perverted kind of new womanhood” of Sarah Palin, Meg Whitman, and Nikki Haley. Ladies of the Left beware! warns Morford. The success of these “largely insufferable” conservative women comes packaged with a “s–bag of downsides, drawbacks, jackals and bitches.”

You kiss your mama with that mouth, Mark?

After a handful of slobbering sentences about progressive men with “perfectly sculpted genitalia” (no, I’m not kidding) and several more about their fat and sweaty Republican counterparts, Morford uses his column to explain that conservative women aren’t allowed to be feminists and don’t actually qualify as women anyway:

Witness, won’t you, the zeitgeist’s nightmare trifecta of largely insufferable women, the Sarah Palin/Carly Fiorina/Michele Bachmann hydra-headed hellbeast of pseudo-women, one part huge cash reserves, one part evil grammar-abusing ditzball psychopath, one part sassy misinformed moxie, overlaid with wonky ideas of motherhood, love of guns and ignorance of sex and reproductive rights.

These, along with Meg “I’m a Billionaire!” Whitman and Nikki “Sarah Palin hugged me!” Haley, et al, are the apparent “champions” of a perverted kind of new womanhood, some sort of mutant breed who claim it’s entirely possible, even desirable to be “pro-life and pro-feminist,” which is a bit like saying you’re “pro-oil spill and pro-environment.”

In other words: Sorry, no. No f–ing way. This is the rule: You do not ever get to say you’re any kind of feminist or champion of women and mothers everywhere, and in the same breath add that you also believe no woman should have control over her reproductive powers and, by the way, poor immigrant women should be sent back to Mexico and guns should be legal for all.

Another day, another tiresome attempt to dehumanize conservative women and belittle their accomplishments with absurd caricatures, vicious insults, and largely insufferable prose.

But at least Morford’s portrayal of successful conservative women as “some sort of mutant breed” of “pseudo-women” was condemned by the feminist Left, wasn’t it? No, as usual a man who calls himself progressive gets a free pass on misogyny as leftist women lap up puddles of his hateful venom.

A Jezebel writer calls his piece “a thoughtful column.” “Love this thoughtful and insightful rant,” writes Caitlin Kelly at True/Slant. British journalist Alison Clarke thinks Morford is “just plain wrong,” but only because he fails to acknowledge that enlightened feminists like her already know that conservative women are “a whole delightful s–bag of downsides.”

Men on the Left have had it affirmed for them time and again that misogyny is perfectly acceptable – even desirable – as long as women on the Right are the targets. Even public rape fantasies about conservative women are excused. As long as these men are good little lefty foot soldiers, they’re welcome to direct all manner of misogyny toward women who fail to toe the line on abortion, gun control, and illegal immigration.

So, Mark. As long as we’re making up rules, here’s one for you: You do not ever get to create feminist litmus tests, and in the same breath call Sarah Palin, Nikki Haley, and others pseudo-women and bitches.

I think it’s clear who the real anti-feminist is.

Update: Sister Toldjah also has a few choice words for Mark Morford.

Decked out in flashy burlesque costumes, five dancers mouth sexually suggestive lyrics as they writhe and shimmy across the stage.   The audience hoots and hollers as they gyrate to Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).”

If you’ve seen the viral video then you already know: these YouTube sensations are just eight and nine years old.

The sight of a talented youth troupe thrusting their hips in shiny red hot pants prompted many commentators to condemn the parents and teachers involved.  But not everyone was on board.  In a Salon column last week, an infuriated Ada Calhoun ripped into critics for their “hysteria” and “moral panic” over the YouTube clip.  And the icing on her lily white cake of predictability?  If you criticize the video, you’re a racist.

But let’s start with Calhoun’s first beef with those of us who find the video disturbing. “Can we stop yelling at young women to put their clothes back on?” she asks.

These aren’t “young women.” They’re little girls who need to have their talent nurtured by responsible adults willing to set boundaries.  Instead, they’re being exploited by people catering to some Mohammedan fantasy.

No serious commentator yelled at the kids “to put their clothes back on.” The criticisms were directed at parents, choreographers, and anyone else who pretends that young talent can’t be nourished without rummaging through Dita von Teese’s wardrobe.

Calhoun’s next argument is that you should shut your hysterical neo-Victorian trap if all you can do is whine about kids today boppin’ to their doggone rock and roll records. “In every era, there are moral panics about girls; they all project the same tone of hysteria and the same cultural amnesia,” she writes.

Hysteria? This isn’t some town fight between the Squares and the Drapes or a moral panic about the “sinful gyrations” of Elvis Presley.  The outrage is that parents and teachers are coaching eight-year-olds to mimic sex acts for an audience of cheering adults.   In an era when thong panties come in tween sizes and condoms are handed out at school, there’s nothing prudish or panicky about encouraging kids to be kids.

But even that’s a problem for Calhoun who complains that “almost every article” included the line “Can’t we just let little girls be little girls?”  Is it really beyond the pale to suggest that parents shouldn’t rush their kids through childhood? Isn’t that Good Parenting 101?

Not in Calhoun’s eyes. She wrote an entire book on her parenting philosophy called Instinctive Parenting: Trusting Ourselves to Raise Good Kids. One Amazon reviewer called it “an entire book of excuses for being a bad parent.”

Now let’s return to Calhoun’s delightful charges of racism, quoted at length on the next page because laughter is good for the soul:

Why are there no Op-Eds when black girls dress or dance this way? If the problem is really with girls wearing these outfits, or dancing in this manner, why is it that the hundreds of YouTube videos of black 8- and 9-year-old girls doing their best “Single Ladies” (I just watched a bunch, some from dance competitions and some to the very same song) aren’t cause for alarm? Why aren’t their parents called to the carpet on morning television? Are they not relevant to the discussion for some reason I don’t understand?

And I’m no cultural studies expert, but the indignation over how (white) kids today like to dance (too much gyrating!) sounds an awful lot like the outrage over the effect “black music” had on white America in the 1950s. There is a lot of fear in the discussion of these dance competition girls: fear of sexuality, sure, but also, I think, fear of how diverse pop culture has become.

This could easily be a parody of Greg Gutfeld’s “Gregalogue” commentaries on “Red Eye”: “If you disagree with me, you’re probably a racist homophobe who eats unicorns.”  Incidentally, you know who else cries racism when you object to the exploitation of children? Pedophile activists. Is that who Ada Calhoun really wants to ally herself with?

After smearing everyone who objects to the early sexualization of children as racist, Calhoun demands to know why no one appreciates the girls’ for their talent.  I wonder how she reconciles that with her earlier observation that most writing on this issue includes the “grudging admission that ‘the girls were spectacular dancers.’”

Calhoun finishes her piece by reminding us that we’re all hysterical prudish scolds.

Of course, when these girls are parents themselves, they will be just as horrified by something their daughters are doing — hyper-driving their space-cars in foil miniskirts, say.

It’s just how we are, how we’ve always been, and probably always will be with girls: judgmental, scolding and afraid.

And that, not five young girls’ choreography, is the real shame.

But it isn’t just the choreography, it’s the entire performance.  It’s the skimpy costumes designed to give the illusion of curves where children have none. It’s the sight of children undulating in distinctly un-childlike ways while mouthing lyrics about what men need to do to get laid. What kind of lesson is it to girls that the skimpiest, thrustiest routine wins?

If Ada Calhoun can’t understand the problem, it’s time for her to turn in her feminist card.

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Should surgeons promote an aesthetic standard for little girls’ genitals? Pediatric urologist Dix Poppas thinks so, and he’s more than happy to slice and dice away any deviations in the size and shape of your daughter’s clitoris.

This elective butchery of little girls isn’t based on the edict of some Muslim cleric in Yemen or Egypt. Instead, this is medical advice from a respected, board certified Cornell University researcher who performs these partial clitoridectomies on infants and children at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

Poppas carries out these surgical assaults on girls born with cosmetically atypical genitalia that he deems masculine or ambiguous in appearance.  Some of his patients undergo this cosmetic procedure at under six months of age after Poppas tells their parents that with surgical “correction,” a “normal physiologic, emotional, and sexual development can be achieved.”

But is there evidence that girls with large clitorises are at risk of developmental problems?  Not at all, say Alice Dreger and Ellen K. Feder in a new Bioethics Forum commentary:

For over a decade, many people (including us) have criticized this surgical practice. Critics in medicine, bioethics, and patient advocacy have questioned the surgery’s necessity, safety, and efficacy.  We still know of no evidence that a large clitoris increases psychological risk (so is the surgery even necessary?), and we do know of substantial anecdotal evidence that it does not increase risk. Importantly, there also seems to be evidence that clitoroplasties performed in infancy do increase risk – of harm to physical and sexual functioning, as well as psychosocial harm.

This isn’t the equivalent of surgically treating a disabling cleft palate; it’s the risky, medically unnecessary reduction of a sexual organ.  It doesn’t improve function or hygiene; instead, it jeopardizes future sexual sensation for the frivolous goal of ensuring these girls fit in with the other kids when they play “I’ll show you mine.”

Columnist Dan Savage writes, “There’s lots to be outraged about here: there’s nothing wrong with these girls and their healthy, functional-if-larger-than-average clitorises; there’s no need to operate on these girls; and surgically altering a girl’s clitoris because it’s “too big” has been found to do lasting physical and psychological harm.”  And Slate‘s Rachael Larimore observes, “One doesn’t have to be a doctor to realize that this is nothing less than the same genital mutilation that women regularly undergo in Africa and the Middle East. But it’s happening at one of our top institutions of higher learning.”

Indeed, sterile blades and lip service paid to the preservation of clitoral sensation are the only things distinguishing this genital mutilation from the ritual excisions that permanently scar millions of women around the world.

Dr. Poppas contends that his clitoral reduction surgery isn’t misogynist quackery because it utilizes a “nerve-sparing” technique designed to minimize sexual dysfunction.  How does he know? He uses vibrators to stimulate the girls’ clitorises during followup exams.

At annual visits after the surgery, while a parent watches, Poppas touches the daughter’s surgically shortened clitoris with a cotton-tip applicator and/or with a “vibratory device,” and the girl is asked to report to Poppas how strongly she feels him touching her clitoris. Using the vibrator, he also touches her on her inner thigh, her labia minora, and the introitus of her vagina, asking her to report, on a scale of 0 (no sensation) to 5 (maximum), how strongly she feels the touch. Yang, Felsen, and Poppas also report a “capillary perfusion testing,” which means a physician or nurse pushes a finger nail on the girl’s clitoris to see if the blood goes away and comes back, a sign of healthy tissue. Poppas has indicated in this article and elsewhere that ideally he seeks to conduct annual exams with these girls. He intends to chart the development of their sexual sensation over time.

I guess that’s one way to explain why you have a lifetime supply of Trojan Vibrating Touch personal massagers stashed in your closet:  “But officer, they’re for the children!”

Unsurprisingly, Dreger and Feder were unable to find another pediatric urologist who uses this “ground breaking” post-surgical kiddie diddling technique.  What’s more, Poppas knows that inflicting this sort of trauma on children is far beyond the bounds of acceptable scientific practice.  That’s why he didn’t bother to obtain IRB approval for his unorthodox use of “vibratory devices.”  Dreger explains:

If he had sought IRB approval for the “sensory testing,” the ethics staff might have sat up and asked him what the heck he thought he was doing to these girls, and they would have tried to make sure the parents were informed about the unknowns and risks, and the girls could have refused to participate.

Perhaps Dix Poppas (whose name could inspire an entire Freudian treatise) thinks his work is so important that ethical boundaries don’t apply. Maybe he’s simply a child molester who takes sadistic pleasure in mutilating and traumatizing the most vulnerable among us.  Either way, we can’t allow his battery of little girls to go on, not for one more day.

Contact:

Rosemary Kraemer, PhD
Director, Human Subjects Protections
Weill Cornell Medical College Institutional Review Board
E-mail: rtkraeme@med.cornell.edu
Telephone: (646) 962-8200

And please call on the American Board of Urology and the American Academy of Pediatrics to condemn Dix Poppas’ unethical research and clinical practices.

Thanks to Rachael Larimore and @sarahbellumd for alerting me to this story on Twitter.

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