Ugh

teague

That’s all I can say. The University of Minnesota athletic director has resigned. Why, you might wonder.

Since coming to the university, Teague had presented himself to the media as someone who was a good source and not afraid to get blunt. For a reporter, that was extremely valuable. After he arrived, and before Dec. 13, 2013, he and I had drinks five to seven times, all but one of those occasions in a group setting. I also attended several cocktail parties at his house. I was happy to have such a useful window into the program. We talked about basketball, coaches and his plans for the department.

So I agreed to have that drink. But this December night was different. Teague asked me about my longtime boyfriend, as he often did. My mistake was acknowledging that we had just broken up. The switch flipped. Suddenly, in a public and crowded bar, Teague tried to throw his arm around me. He poked my side. He pinched my hip. He grabbed at me. Stunned and mortified, I swatted his advances and firmly told him to stop. He didn’t.

“Don’t deny,” he said, “our chemistry.”

[Read more…]

It’s a mystery!

Magnus-Pyke-shouting-Science

I have a question for the partnered gay and lesbian couples out there. I know you get the question, Which one of you is the “man”, and which is the “woman” from ignoramuses who are unable to think beyond their narrow sexual biases, but I’m wondering about a subtler, messier question.

Do you ever get asked, Which one is the mysterious one with incomprehensible desires? I’m curious because the BBC aired one of those science of sex shows titled, The MYSTERY of the Female Orgasm, which seems to be the standard question. Woman is mysterious…must seek out a pick-up artist to explain the cheat code (it’s up-up-left-down-down-right).

[Read more…]

Katha Pollitt is on the mark

She has written an excellent post on abortion.

I cringed as I watched Planned Parenthood’s president, Cecile Richards, apologize in a YouTube video last month for the lack of “compassion” in two doctors’ language at supposed business lunches arranged and secretly recorded by the anti-abortion Center for Medical Progress.

Not because she wasn’t eloquent, but because of what her words said about the impossibly narrow path abortion providers now are forced to walk. After all, have you ever heard an apology from a crisis pregnancy center for masquerading as an abortion clinic? What about the women in Texas who lost access to gynecological care when the state defunded Planned Parenthood and did not, as promised, adequately replace its services? Has anyone said sorry about that?

[Read more…]

How does this get past an editor?

dustyspringfield

From a review by Roger Lewis of a biography of Dusty Springfield:

Call me a crazy old physiognomist, but my theory is that you can always spot a lesbian by her big thrusting chin. Celebrity Eskimo Sandi Toksvig, Ellen DeGeneres, Jodie Foster, Clare Balding, Vita Sackville-West, God love them: there’s a touch of Desperate Dan in the jaw-bone area, no doubt the better to go bobbing for apples.

It is thus a tragedy that Dusty Springfield’s whole existence was blighted by her orientation, which explains ‘the silence and secrecy she extended over much of her life, and her self-loathing’. One glance at her chin should have revealed all — but the Sixties was not a fraction as liberated and swinging as people now assume. ‘Being gay was either a pitiable affliction or an actual mental illness,’ Karen Bartlett reminds us in this sympathetic biography. Victims were treated with aversion therapy and electric shocks.

My theory is that you can always spot an asshole by the thoughtless bigotry they say.

You mean that isn’t what lady history is all about?

ripper

There’s a new museum in London, and it promised to “retell the story of the East End through the eyes, voices, experiences and actions” of women and show their contribution to British history. Sounds promising!

Former Google diversity chief Mark Palmer-Edgecumbe, who is behind the scheme, promised “the first women’s museum in the UK” in plans given the green light by Tower Hamlets council last year.

But when the covers were removed from the site on Cable Street in Whitechapel last week, residents were shocked to find its subject matter had changed to the brutal unsolved murders of prostitutes between 1888 and 1891.

The Jack The Ripper Museum, which has as its logo a sinister silhouette of a man in Victorian dress above the museum name written in blood red, has outraged residents, who claim it is now about misogyny rather than women’s achievements.

[Read more…]