Number of the Day

1%: The percentage of the world's wealth held by women, despite the fact that they comprise 40% of the world's workforce.

There Are Just SO MANY Ways to Be a Bad Mother

Here's one that everyone who's anyone an asshole is talking about this week:


Victoria "Posh" Beckham was out and about this week with new daughter Harper, and she was wearing her signature high heels, thus allegedly proving she obviously has no regard for her daughter's safety.

Maybe because I am not a mother myself, or possibly because I'm not a self-important dipfuck who uses my own experience as a benchmark against whom everyone else on the planet is measured in a perpetual game of negative judgment I play in a void of self-esteem, I fail to comprehend the reasoning at work here. I understand it goes a little something like, "That bitch is gonna trip in those shoes and kill her baby," but the logic, such as it is, really broke down for me when I took two nanoseconds to contemplate the fact that Victoria Beckham routinely wears heels that are frequently described with words like "precarious" by people who don't share her affinity and talent for wearing them.

I guess what I'm saying is: I have no reason to suspect that Victoria Beckham isn't precisely as proficient in towering heels with a baby in her arms as she is without a baby in her arms, or that she's any more likely to trip while wearing shoes she wears all the time than she is while wearing ballet slippers.

That deduction didn't exactly tax my brain, disabled by its ladyness even though it is. So I suspect that maybe the criticisms of Posh are not really about Posh at all, but about a familiar commentary on motherhood and womanhood, and how women must, at all times, sacrifice evidence of their womanhood, their femininity, to the altar of motherhood. Nothing, of course, makes a woman a more terrible mother than putting herself first, or even the appearance thereof.

I also suspect that the criticisms are a reflection of many people's inability to see past their own experience so that they might credit others with experiences they don't have. Sure, I look at Victoria Beckham's shoes and see a pair of ankle-breakers, but I am not Victoria Beckham. It really doesn't matter that I would be likely to trip in those shoes, because she isn't.

This is a small thing, or seems like it, in the scheme of all things. But it's emblematic of a culture in which we are increasingly hostile toward other people's individual experiences and capabilities, because the only way to judge them, the only way to wield our sanctimony like a weapon of destruction, tearing someone else down because it's so much easier than building ourselves up, which takes time and energy and self-reflection and honesty about our own flaws, the only thing that makes engaging in the harsh cultural pastime of ad hominem criticism, is to fail, deliberately and utterly, to see the targets of our judgment as unique human beings, with their own particular set of circumstances that may be very different from our own.

Maybe it would be a bad idea for you to walk in stilettos while carrying an infant. That doesn't mean it's axiomatically bad for Victoria Beckham to do the same.

To ignore even these little differences between people is to deny other people's individual humanity.

So casually do we engage in such a brutal denial, when we say, even obliquely, the world should be just like me.

Quote of the Day

[Trigger warning for racism, sexism, ablism.]

"I can't really tell for sure, but a number of people are abuzz about this video of Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Hussein Obama Idi Amin Dada. The consensus seems to be that the First Ms. Thang is saying to hubby Barack, 'All of this for a damn flag.' (She said this about the American flag—you know the one brave men died for.) Wouldn't be surprised if that's what she said because we know she hates America and previously said she wasn't proud of our country until Obama had a chance to become Prez. Looks like that's what she said, but I can't tell for sure. I would need a deaf person or other expert lip reader to confirm. Watch and see if you agree (like I said, even if she didn't say exactly that, we know she's thinkin' it)."—Rightwing asshole Debbie Schlussel, on the latest pearl-clutcher scandalizing the conservative blogosphere. Media Matters has more here.

Hey, Debbie—don't look now, but in the middle of your sneering racist screed at the First Lady, you also managed to slight every female soldier who has fought and died for her country. Whoooooops!

P.S. Not all hearing impaired people are "expert lip readers." FYI.

[H/T to @BenDimiero.]

Dame Gwyneth Paltrow Thinks My Life Is Meaningless

Not only am I fat, which obviously makes me human garbage, but I am also not a mother and have no plans to be one, which, no doy, renders my life a hollow shell with no "real meaning."

Paltrow is so "happy" that her good friend Jay-Z and his wife Beyoncé are expecting and admits that becoming a parent really puts everything in perspective.

"I think motherhood is the biggest blessing of all time and it give your life real meaning," she points out. "It's always interesting when you're a woman with success and you've achieved a lot, and then you have a baby and you realize everything you thought was an achievement really is nothing until you have a kid, and I think that will be [Beyoncé's] experience."

Someone needs to introduce Gwyneth Paltrow to the concept of "I language." It's fine and dandy if she finds motherhood to be her "biggest blessing of all time," the thing that gave her life "real meaning" and rendered all of her previous achievements relatively insignificant, but it is gross and offensive to universalize that experience and thus suggest that any woman's accomplishments pale in comparison to motherhood, that every woman's life is devoid of "real meaning" unless and until she becomes a mother.

And, you know, it's not just gross and offensive to women who cannot have children, and to women who choose not to have children, but it's also gross and offensive to the millions of women around the world who are not fortunate enough to have a choice about motherhood at all, the women for whom motherhood is not a carefully planned option in a lifetime of available options, but an inescapable fate, by virtue of forced marriage, rape, lack of access to free or affordable birth control, lack of access to safe and/or legal abortion.

Motherhood is not always a blessing. And, for many women, choosing to not be a mother is one of the most radical, self-defining, meaningful acts they will make in a life full of meaningful acts.

It is evidence of privilege to not know these things.

Speak for yourself, Gwyneth Paltrow. Please.

[Related Reading: Nope!]