Ryan Cooper

This never ends . The GOP has managed to whip their base into a frenzy over contraception: But more than the other rallying points, the battle over contraceptive coverage at religiously affiliated institutions has bound together Republicans of all stripes because it hits core GOP themes: religious liberty, government intrusion and reproduction politics. Perhaps more important politically, it has given Republicans something to talk about other than the economy, just when Obama’s gotten a lift from modest gains. The power of the issue with conservatives was on display on the first day of CPAC, where the contraception regulation was the dominant topic — virtually every speaker tried to fire up the audience talking about it. Kevin Drum is righteously pissed : My position on this is plain: the church hierarchy's objection to birth control is medieval and barbaric. All those Catholic pundits raising hell over the new contraception regs should spend their time instead raising hell wit...

On the heels of Koman's shamefaced backpedaling from its decision to defund Planned Parenthood: ...here comes the latest culture war awfulness, from some chowderheaded bigots in Louisiana: Three Girl Scout troops in Louisiana won't be hawking Thin Mints this year. They've disbanded in protest after the Girl Scouts of Colorado accepted seven-year-old transgender child Bobby Montoya as a member. Montoya was born a boy but has considered herself a girl since she was two years old, says her mom Felisha Archuleta. In October, Archuleta took her daughter to speak with a Denver troop leader about signing up, and took her daughter away crying after the Scout leader referred to the child as "it" and said "Everyone will know he's a boy." Three weeks later, the statewide Girl Scouts body issued a statement saying, "If a child identifies as a girl and the child's family presents her as a girl, Girl Scouts of Colorado welcomes her as a Girl Scout....

Jeff Goldberg has the goods : But three sources with direct knowledge of the Komen decision-making process told me that the rule was adopted in order to create an excuse to cut-off Planned Parenthood. (Komen gives out grants to roughly 2,000 organizations, and the new "no-investigations" rule applies to only one so far.) The decision to create a rule that would cut funding to Planned Parenthood, according to these sources, was driven by the organization's new senior vice-president for public policy, Karen Handel, a former gubernatorial candidate from Georgia who is staunchly anti-abortion and who has said that since she is "pro-life, I do not support the mission of Planned Parenthood." ...The decision, made in December, caused an uproar inside Komen. Three sources told me that the organization's top public health official, Mollie Williams, resigned in protest immediately following the Komen board's decision to cut off Planned Parenthood. Williams, who...

Dear god : Nearly one in five women surveyed said they had been raped or had experienced an attempted rape at some point, and one in four reported being beaten by an intimate partner. One in six women have been stalked, according to the report. Easy for most guys to overlook, I suspect. There is a long ways yet to go to civilize men.

Via Sullivan , check out this Dan Savage interview : ...heterosexual male identity — and in America I don’t want to get too pointy-headed about it, but it’s really this package of negatives. You know, to be a straight guy is not to be a woman and not to be a faggot and so it doesn’t really leave you much room to maneuver. If there’s anything about your interests or personality that can be remotely perceived as feminine or faggoty, you have to kill it or people won’t believe you’re straight or you’ll be tormented — you know, questions for the rest of your life. And it’s kind of sad to watch how hemmed-in straight guys are. That is surely true, but there's another aspect to this as well. Growing up as a straight boy, especially in a liberal environment, you are constantly bombarded by the ways men have treated and continue to treat women like shit. They are all absolutely true. Just the other day I read the most horrifying piece on the daily violent abuse to which female bloggers ...

Sometimes people point out how web journalism is an overwhelmingly white male phenomenon. Wonder why? This is probably part of it : I got my first rape threat as a blogger when I was on Blogspot, so new that I still had the default theme up and hadn’t even added anything to the sidebar. I can’t even remember the pseudonym I was using then, and I probably had about 10 hits on a good day, seven of which were me compulsively loading the page just to make sure it still existed, and the other two of which were probably my friends. I wrote a post about some local political issue or another, expressing my misgivings, and a reader kindly took time out of his day to email me. ‘You stupid cunt,’ he said, ‘all you need is a good fucking and then you’d be less uptight.’ I stared at it for a couple of minutes, too shocked to move. There it was on my screen, not going away. Someone really had thought it was appropriate not just to write this email to a complete stranger, a totally unknown perso...

TNC adds his typically astute two cents : For whatever reason, I think Internet sites that allow trolling and aimless idiocy to run roughshod have a disproportionate effect on women. (Terri Oda hints at exactly that here .)  I don't know if that's because trolls and idiots are more likely to say something sexist or what. But I don't think the problem is aggressive argumentation, so much as its weak people saying these behind a cloak of anonymity which they'd never say publicly... Incorporating women voices isn't just a matter of getting a bunch of people with a different make-up of chromosomes to nod along. It's a matter of opening yourself to people who, fairly regularly, will dispute what you have to say, in ways that, initially at least, don't even seem credible to you. But often the most interesting lines of attack are the ones that seem preposterous at first glance, and yet stick with you. For my money, that's the real "strong debate"--...

The NYT has a fascinating article out on Wikipedia's gender balance: About a year ago, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia, collaborated on a study of Wikipedia’s contributor base and discovered that it was barely 13 percent women; the average age of a contributor was in the mid-20s, according to the study by a joint center of the United Nations University and Maastricht University. Sue Gardner, the executive director of the foundation, has set a goal to raise the share of female contributors to 25 percent by 2015, but she is running up against the traditions of the computer world and an obsessive fact-loving realm that is dominated by men and, some say, uncomfortable for women. On first blush, it's hard to know how a sexist bias would operate. The big activities where sexism has been definitively identified in the business world, viz. hiring, firing, and raises, don't exist in Wikipedia. After all, there are by definition no barri...

Becca has a smart post on gender in South Africa: Here in South Africa, you can say that there are issues of gender inequity and there certainly are. The rape rate is extremely high. The HIV prevalence rate is higher in women then men (partially for biological reasons as women have more Langerhans cells in their vagina than men who have been circumsized do on their penis). It is difficult for women to exert control over their sexual lives – to say no or to say to use a condom. Transactional sex is also an issue. That being said, I know many more formally employed women than men in our village. Of course, many men who are employed live outside of our village, but among those who do stay in the village and those who come to our village to work – teachers, nurses, etc – there are more women then men. Of the men who stay in our village, many are employed informally in different types of labor. Some of these men and some who are not employed at all spend a good amount of their days drin...

A few days back, after the tryout of former video-game host Olivia Munn, Jezebel posted an indictment of The Daily Show : The Daily Show is many things: progressive darling, alleged news source for America's youth, righteous media critique. And it's also a boys' club where women's contributions are often ignored and dismissed. The show responded with this letter from women staffers: The Daily Show isn't a place where women quietly suffer on the sidelines as barely tolerated tokens. On the contrary: just like the men here, we're indispensable. We generate a significant portion of the show's creative content and the fact is, it wouldn't be the show that you love without us. It's tough to know what to make of this. Comedy is, indisputably, a male-dominated profession. Take a look at Comedy Central's list of the 100 best comedians--by my count, eight of them are women. And according to Jezebel, Munn is only the second female correspondent in...