Musings of an Inappropriate Woman

Off to the Future Summit of Journalism today. I’ll be taking my laptop and may live blog if there’s free wireless available - but this is Sydney, not SXSW, so don’t hold your breath.

jessicagoldharalson:

Today marks a momentous occasion:

I’ve now been personally e-mailed by both Julia Allison and Jakob Lodwick to STFU.

What does this mean?

Should I collect angry e-mails from butthurt Internet personalities in my trapper keeper? Like a sticker collection for the creative underclass?

What do you guys think?

Wow. I thought Jakob was better than that. I’m just moved he elected to personally argue with me on his Tumblr, affording me a whole bunch of new readers. Thanks Jakob!

Long, but intelligent and well worth reading post on the minimum wage debate from squashed.

squashed:

I have it on good authority that my previous post contained an implausible hypothetical about tomatoes. I might refer interested parties to recent efforts to boycott fastfood restaraunts due to poor conditions for tomato pickers or argue that an oversupply of unskilled labor is a large part of the reason we have the border tension we. Instead I’ll restate the argument. I haven’t become an economist overnight—and I’d hate to bother any of my actual economist friends over an Internet dispute (but Keith, if you happen to be reading this by RSS anyway, shoot me an email and let me know how I did.) Here is why a minimum wage makes economic sense:

1. In a properly constructed society, everybody should be able to afford their basic needs if they are willing to work. Needs include (at least) food, clothing, housing, medical care, and whatever it takes to secure these. Willing to work means merely willing, not both willing and able.
2. For those who are willing but unable to work enough to meet their needs, we’ll need some sort of wealth transfer. People might be unable to work because of permanent or temporary disability or because there aren’t enough jobs out there. In either case, they’ll need some sort of wealth transfer.
3. Three bucks an hour isn’t enough to meet the conditions in (1), so if you’re paying employees $3/hr to walk behind and fan you or pick up trash behind you or hold a sign for you or whatever sort of labor you’d pay $3/hr for, they will have to find the rest of their needed money somewhere else. You are getting the value of that person working full time, but somebody else has to pay for it. It may be welfare. It may be a charity. Either way, your menial labor is being subsidized by the rest of society.
4. A properly set minimum wage should avoids this by ensuring that full time work leads to enough pay to live off.
5. I’ll save Jakob the time and point out myself that this could leave the $3/hr jobs undone. This is partially true. But there are a lot of jobs worth $3/hr. The real question is who gets to offer them. I would let the government offer these jobs—but instead of $3/hr it will pay minimum wage—because it would have to pay that money out later anyway. Think of the Hoover Dam and the CCC. These are large projects undertaken at times when there weren’t enough jobs to go around. Jobs created for the sake of creating jobs is not the most efficient solution—but it may be more efficient than a straight wealth transfer. And if the government can’t think of enough jobs to create, it can tweak the minimum wage down and allow some people to get sub-subsistence pay somewhere privately. If the economy is working as desired, this shouldn’t be necessary. Everybody should be able to find a paying at least minimum wage. In that case, the law would just be redundant.

atheistramblings:

The one saving grace, for me, of the Australian electoral system is that we have preferential voting, unfortunately it is an under used, misunderstood tool for the electorate that the parties are able to manipulate to their advantage.

Viva la Republique!

UPDATE: If Americans had preferential voting then Gore would have won in Florida with or without any hanging chads.

I love preferential voting. When I was in Las Vegas, I explained how it worked to some delighted shop assistants in Anthropologie. You know, instead of drinking or gambling. ‘Cos that’s how I roll.

jessicagoldharalson:

One thing I come across a lot in feminist circles in regards to the ridiculous controversy surrounding the Open Source Boob Project is the Choice Feminsist Defense. As in,

“But she had the freedom to make her choice! So that means, no matter what the woman decides, it’s not sexist at all! How could you demean her decision is she made that decision freely? If a woman makes her choice, well that’s feminist! *Harrumph*

butterflyeffect:

Aren’t Hillary and Barack supposed to be on the same side?

I mean, you have to go around the whole country, spending a zillion dollars, having separate elections in X number of states just to work out who’s going to lead a party? Where I come from, all that crap is sorted out behind closed doors….

American politics does my head in.

I don’t know. I’d like to have a say in who leads my party of choice. I think it’s great that the Americans take it to the people, although I concede that this does mean spending an awful lot of money, making it prohibitive for anyone who wasn’t moneyed up to get the job. Although Obama’s lots-of-small-donations strategy is impressive on this front.

somethingchanged:

Reputation Management

• Reputation Management Emancipation Proclamation: 10 Ways to “Own” Yourself Online (Stuntdubl): How do you build your personal brand? Todd details 10 great tips, including registering your name on every social network, getting interviews, and speaking at industry events.
• Buzz Monitoring: 26 Free Tools You Must Have (Marketing Pilgrim): Andy Beal talks about the 26 tools that help you monitor your reputation online. He’s also coming out with a book in February entitled Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online which will give away all his trade secrets.
• Reputation Management You May Be Missing (Vanessa Fox): Using an obscure search engine gave Vanessa incentive to write a post about how utilizing any profiles (even less-trafficked ones) can till help manage your reputation online.
• Full Blown Reputation Management Campaign (Shimon Sandler): Need to bury bad press? Shimon outlines what your campaign should offer should you offer reputation management services.
• Five Ways Negative Reviews Help Your Online Reputation (Andy Beal): A positive reputation comes from embracing negative reviews.
• The Definitive Guide to Online Reputation Management (Scoreboard Media): Brian Provost gives strategies for owning the first page of the search results.
• 31 Places to Monitor Your Reputation Online (Search Marketing Gurus): Explore every nook and cranny to get the most out of your reputation management campaign.
• 10 Ways to Fix a Google Reputation Management Nightmare (Marketing Pilgrim): What’s the best content to fill up page 1 of the search results? Ask Andy Beal, or just read this post.
• Beware: Your Digital Footprint is Your Resume (Search Engine People): Jeff Quipp talks about how everything you do can be traced back to you.
• PR Disasters Lurk in Web 2.0 Chicanery (RogerD’s Notebook): If you’re going to go into reputation management, you better understand the Internet. Bad reputation management is noticeable.
• Using Social Media to Help Manage Online Reputation (SearchRank): David Wallace illustrates how reputation management works and explains how engagement in social media can help change perceptions.
• DIY Reputation Management (CNet): Stephan Spencer talks about how to do reputation management right in a short easy-to-read list.
• Reputation Management and Search: Avoiding Chunnel Vision (RB Digital Rodeo): Sure, reputation management is a good step in the right direction, but the reality is that your search engine rankings are usually not where the problem lies. via Techipedia

It looks like everybody’s favourite undercover magazine blog (that’d be 4inchheelsonly) got hacked.

jessicalouise:

But there should be no shame in a love of Gossip Girl. After all, it is (and we have come to this conclusion honestly) the most awesomely awesome show ever.

No no just NO. The thing that makes watching Gossip Girl fun is the shame factor. You settle in and watch it while eating a tub of gourmet ice cream (knowing that you probably shouldnt) because it’s a guilty pleasure. You know it isnt good but you like it anyway. It has pretty clothes and pretty boys and more pretty boys and cute shoes, it’s a bit camp, and is set in a world you think might exist but will never get to experience anyway so this is the closest thing.

It is NOT “the best show ever” and it is certainly not “genius.” It’s a good teen show, i’ll give them that. But “OMFG BEST SHOW EVER!” only a MORON would think that. A moron who has not watched The Wire or Curb Your Enthusiasm or, fuck, even Friday Night Lights for that matter would think or say that.

Bleh. I hate it when media fuckwits ruin things for me.

I love Gossip Girl, and I think it’s a genuinely good show (I find the Serena/Blair relationship fascinating, for one, and Blair fascinates me just generally), but I agree that it’s a bit silly to call it “the most awesomely awesome show ever”, even as one who loves teen shows. I mean, The OC was great in Season 1, and by Season 3 it wasn’t worth watching. Even Dawson’s Creek had it’s OMG-exciting years (anyone remember that Joey/Pacey kiss on the side of the road? or Andie and Dawson getting drunk and doing karaoke?).

I like to think the writers at New York magazine were being intentionally silly and fangirl-ish when they wrote that, though. Let’s hope.

[redacted]: thesis??! you don’t get enough writing already?!! madwoman. xxx

me: Oh, I definitely get enough writing already. I just keep having these pesky “ideas” that I want to get out there!

marco:

Sara Zucker asks for male comments on our opinions of the female body:

[…] society has attempted to make us females feel that we must be thin and fit to attract the male population, but i am quite sure that this is not true because, for any topic, opinions vary. […]

The ideal defined by “society” (fashion, more accurately?) is unachievable for nearly everyone. And keep in mind that there are three pressures at work here, from our point of view:

1. Women are pressured to look like that ideal.
2. Men are pressured to find and date people who look like that ideal.
3. Men are pressured not to find other body types attractive.

That last one’s important. You may not have known about it. Plenty of guys are attracted to women who are far from skinny models, but they don’t want to admit it because they’re afraid of what other guys will think and say.

It takes a strong woman to ignore those ideals and be comfortable with herself as she is — similarly, it takes a strong man to ignore those pressures and let his natural attraction urges happen, even when he’s not being attracted to a model. Not every man is that strong.

Different men have different tastes and preferences. And it’s not just physical. Some women become more attractive as you talk with them and spend time with them. Others become hideously ugly after 30 seconds of interaction. Appearance is cheap. There’s an infinite supply of physically attractive women out there. But nothing can make an idiot interesting.

It’s also important to realize the distinction between “attracting the male population” (or attracting the fashion industry) and attracting enough men that you can choose some good ones to spend time with. You don’t need 3 billion people to want you.

In reality, you don’t need to achieve some unrealistic fashion ideal for men to be attracted to you. You can do it for yourself, or you can do it for fashion. But don’t do it for us. We really don’t care as much as you may think.

maryrambin:

—Charlie, habitual model-dater

 I would not be friends with this guy for long.

noraleah:

“The experience of having lived at varying weights in different places is in my mind almost like the experience of having been different women. I could pretty much tell you my weight at any point in my life, and it would be a reliable guide in terms of what I was doing, where I lived, whom I was sleeping with, and how I felt about it all.”

- Min Jin Lee, author of Free Food for Millionaires, which I couldn’t get through but you might like, in the April issue of Vogue.

 Sounds like a great article. I’d love to read it.

So says A Current Affair, which took to the streets last night to find out what the public thought of Rein’s sartorial choices during her recent world tour with husband Kevin Rudd.

Responses ranged from “just not stylish” to “very frumpy for a first lady” to, from Sydney hairdresser Joh Bailey, who styled Anita Keating, “[Her hair] definitely needs to be blowdried straight and smooth. It’s just not an appropriate look for the world stage.”

More appropriate for that stage, apparently, was Nicholas Sarkozy’s wife Carla Bruni, who was “papped and praised” during her recent visit to the UK. Bruni, if you’re not familiar with her, is a former supermodel.

But not even she escapes criticism in ACA’s online slideshow, which includes a photo of the newly minted French first lady naked, declaring it “a far better look than Bruni’s Soviet Bloc factory worker ensemble when she decides to venture around with clothes on.” At least Bruni fares better than Hillary Clinton, Margaret Thatcher and Imelda Marcos, who is described as “the vain witch who gave Snow White the poison apple”.

Washington Post fashion editor Robin Givhan said in a recent speech to the International Museum of Women that “the combination of politics and fashion is a natural one. Politicians are more concerned about the messages they convey, the way in which they’re coming across to their constituency and the way in which they’re perceived, than any other group of people I can think of, except perhaps for entertainers.” But there’s a big difference between paying attention to one’s appearance and the very shallow misogyny displayed by ACA last night and online.

ACA, unsurprisingly, was quick to distance itself from its own story, host Tracey Grimshaw commenting on its conclusion: “Can you believe it? This woman has founded and run a multimillion dollar business while raising three kids and supporting her husband to the highest office in the land and everyone’s talking about her clothes.”

So why did you run the story, Tracey?