Sex-Pos/Sex Rad Carnival Postponed For Now…Still Accepting Submissions

OK…I know that today was supposed to be the deadline for submissions for the Sex Positive/Sex Radical Carnival that was supposed to be set for October 20th…..but due to unforseen circumstances and the lack of submissions (mostly my fault for forgetting that there are other issues of time for others), I am going to push back the date for the carnival for now.

I will announce the new date as soon as I can tie up some loose ends…or I may just let Bitch | Lab do most of the organizing work and otherwise take the lead while I collect submissions.

I sincerely apologize for any inconviences this may cause…and I still plan on having it ultimately.

 

 

The “Alas, a Porn Portal” Controversy: A Bibliography

Here is a full list of [almost] all of the blog contributions to the “Alas, a Blog” controversy.  My sincere thanks to the folks at Creative Destruction for sending them over.

You will notice that Heart’s Women’s Space has the majority of posts, since she was the most exercised over Amp’s “betrayal”; you will also find Kevin, Belledame, Witchy-Woo, Ginmar, Hugo, Lisa Sabatier, and a few other bloggers you might know…and a few you may not.  Link at your own risk.

If I missed anybody, please let me know.

—————————————————————————————  

http://womensspace.wordpress.com/2006/10/08/alas-a-blog-reviews-hardcore-pornography-websites-did-everybody-but-me-already-know-this/#comment-3416

http://sourduck.blogspot.com/2006/10/alas-porn-site.html

http://womensspace.wordpress.com/2006/10/08/the-revolution-will-be-commodified-alternatives-to-selling-feminist-websites-and-blogs-to-the-man/

http://hugoboy.typepad.com/hugo_schwyzer/2006/10/ampersand_male_.html

http://www.reclusiveleftist.com/?p=411

http://www.reclusiveleftist.com/?p=412

http://laurelin.wordpress.com/2006/10/10/alas-a-sell-out/

http://viv.id.au/blog/?p=88

http://angryforareason.blogspot.com/2006/10/no-really-im-feminist.html

http://sparklematrix.wordpress.com/2006/10/09/alas-a-blog-sold-out-to-pimp-my-ride/

http://ginmar.livejournal.com/909066.html

http://witchywoo.wordpress.com/2006/10/10/fuckery-and-betrayal/

http://rocr.xepher.net/weblog/archives/001793.html

http://womensspace.wordpress.com/2006/10/12/pimp-my-domain-for-dummies-not-mysterious/

http://fauxrealtho.com/2006/10/10/um-yeah/

http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2006/10/11/bad-ideas/

http://community.livejournal.com/mf_unicorns/7838.html

http://incurable-hippie.blogspot.com/2006/10/alas-bastard.html

http://community.livejournal.com/mf_unicorns/8004.html

http://www.slanttruth.com/2006/10/11/confused/

http://community.livejournal.com/mf_unicorns/8258.html

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/42929/

http://danaseilhan.livejournal.com/98287.html

http://melancholicfeminista.blogspot.com/2006/10/new-feminist-blogosphere-blowup-porn.html

http://benmetcalfe.com/blog/index.php/2006/10/13/the-fascinating-tale-of-pro-feminist-male-blogger-and-the-porno-sell-out/

http://blog.shrub.com/archives/tekanji/2006-10-13_426

http://www.feminish.net/2006/10/13/another-world-is-possible/

http://womensspace.wordpress.com/2006/10/13/amp-gate-epilogue/

http://angryandqueer.wordpress.com/2006/10/13/turned-out-to-be-a-unicorn-after-all/

http://castironbalcony.media2.org/?p=268

http://just.shelleypowers.com/diversity/just-walk-away/

http://forfuckssakes.blogspot.com/2006/10/amp-got-hit-by-feminist-police.html

http://www.reappropriate.com/?p=24

http://rocr.xepher.net/weblog/archives/001817.html

http://www.melted-dreams.net/definition/2006/10/12/this-whole-alas-drama-thing/

http://faultline.org/index.php/site/comments/on_blog_policy/

http://pandagon.net/2006/10/11/fuck-ritual-condemnation-but-love-this-post/

http://mindthegapcardiff.blogspot.com/2006/10/alas-fall.html

http://www.rachelstavern.com/?p=224

http://feet2thefire.blogspot.com/2006/10/on-with-ritual-condemnation-i-dont.html

http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2006/10/13/bought-and-sold/

http://just.shelleypowers.com/diversity/this-is-not-a-feminist-weblog/

http://catallarchy.net/blog/archives/2006/10/12/how-not-to-sell-out/

http://www.juliansanchez.com/notes/archives/2006/10/does_the_left_hand_know_what_t.php

http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/site/amptoonscom_ownership_and_site_traffic/

http://www.crescatsententia.org/archives/2006/10/12/#006792

http://womensspace.wordpress.com/2006/10/14/ampgate-reprise-the-good-the-funny-the-real/

http://womensspace.wordpress.com/2006/10/14/pimp-my-domain-for-dummies-experts-weigh-in/

http://happyfeminist.typepad.com/happyfeminist/2006/10/i_dont_have_tim.html

http://thurgood.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_thurgood_archive.html#116058827972363318

http://forfuckssakes.blogspot.com/2006/10/radfem-love-for-yours-truly.html

http://forfuckssakes.blogspot.com/2006/10/if-this-is-radfeminism-i-want-no-part.html

http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2006/october#000493

http://irrationalpoint.blogspot.com/2006/10/and-this-will-be-my-only-word-on.html

http://wampum.wabanaki.net/vault/2006/10/003130.html

http://www.thewebcomiclist.com/news/985/more-on-barry-deutsch039s-sale-of-his-url-to-search-engine-optimization-company

http://www.culturekitchen.com/liza/blog/alas_a_blog_and_good_feminist_business_practices

http://comixpedia.com/more_on_barry_deutschs_sale_of_his_url_to_search_engine_optimization_company

http://hugoboy.typepad.com/hugo_schwyzer/2006/10/amp_thinks_i_hu.html

http://redgarterclubwebsite.com/SmackChron_Blog/2006/10/18/intermission-special-the-alas-a-porn-portal-controversy

Oh, Goddess Damn You, Renegade Evolution…(Not Really ;-) )

Hear I am, about to post Part Deux of my reset of Burqagate/MWF Smackdown!!….and you had to come back from your vacation and drop in that magnificant and stimulating post on the relationship between misogyny and porn.

Why, I oughta……ahhhhh, nutz; still love ‘ya. :hug:

Gotta read a bit more before I fire off my nickel…but rest assured, I will.

Soon.

Bet on it.

 

Intermission Special: The “Alas, a Porn Portal” Controversy

I promise….I will get to Part Deux of the Great Burqagate/Feminist Whiteout shortly; bu I would be totally remiss if I didn’t bring my quarter’s worth on another Blogophoric disturbance amongst the Feminist Force.

In case you have missed the fireworks, the more activist wing of the Radfem Anti-Porn Blogospheric Caucus is all in a big collective snit because of the circumstances involving the Alas, a Blog site, which has been a major playa for A-list feminist bloggers ever since Barry (aka Ampersand or Amp) founded and financed it about four years ago, or so.  Mostly thanks to his leadership and evenhandedness, his blog has maintained a solid and diverse readership, as well as a safety zone for feminists who might not feel comfortable blogging in the more testosterone-fueled zones….and his reputation as a feminist symphatizer who is open to all viewpoints while defending his own has earned him basic respect be even those who may not agree with him.

All, of course, except for the small cabal of the more….shall we say, passionate wing of the RadicalFeminist caucus; who believe that only their kind of radicalfeminism (the kind that distrusts men fundamentally as a tool of patriarchy unless he truely adopts to the letter their theories of male rapicity and female submission under Teh Patriarchy) should be promoted by those who call themselves “feminists”.

Just last year a few of them –mostly led by the likes of Pony, Sam Berg (of Genderberg) Heart (of Women’s Spaces), the irrepressible Witchy-Woo, and Ginmar (of the “gender trumps race”/”Black women simply use the excuse of race to beat up on White women” school)  — got so bent because Amp apparantly allowed one too many MRA’s (Men’s Rights Advocates, the He-Men of the Right who serve only to bash feminism as destroying men) to post without censure, that they even proposed that he dedicate an entire section of his site to radical feminists only to fire off their missives free of criticism…a proposal he rightfully dismissed. They mostly distrust Amp because: (1) he’s a man, and men are basically pollutants who only serve to divide and conquer women for Teh Patriarchy, in the activist radfem view; and (2) he shows waaaay too much tolerance towards the “enemies of feminism”…..including those feminists who don’t quite want to march in perfect rhythm to an antiporn/antiprostitiution rally.  Of course, the fact that Amp is mostly sympathetic to the antiporn/radfem cause, and gives them more than ample room to vent their spleens means little or nothing to the purists; the fact that he is a man is more than enough for them.

Well, that…and the fact that he sold his domain to a porn portal didn’t help.

“Say wuh???” I hear you thinking.

It goes roughly like this: Last September, Amp posted a cryptic message to the blog saying that he was under some real financial strain, and due to that he had decided to put his domain name “amptoons.com” up for sale for some quick cash. What he did not mention then, though, was that he had sold to domain to what is called an “optimizer” portal, which basically uses the traffic count in highly surfed sites to up the rankings of their own sites….and due to the consistently high readership of Alas, a Blog, it stood to really raise the rankings for whomever owned the domain.

The problem was…the new owners promptly decided to use Amp’s domain to link to….you guessed it….a site mostly consisting of reviews of porn sites.

Now, it was done quite discreetly: the only clue as to the new content was a tiny link at the bottom of Alas’s page linking to “reviews software” ; none of the general content of Alas was affected in any way.  Part of the agreement for the sale was that none of the actual bandwidth for Alas would be used expressively for actual porn; nor would there be any direct links to explicit adult material.  (Indeed, not even the “review” site has any direct images to explicit porn; you had to actually click on the individual site review page to even find a link to the actual porn.)

The “review site” itself was also a bit more discreet; it was mostly your typical porn portal offering the usual galleria of sex freakery; with sites ranging from the interracial faire of Lexington Steele to the usual “big tit” and anal vids to the “MILF Hunter”/”Bang Bros” school of “find ’em, fuck’em, and leave ’em variety.  Nothing particularly trailblazing, but nothing particularly extreme.

But for a blog which offered themselves as an explicitly feminist site open to the radfem antiporn viewpoint led by a man who mostly opposes porn as “degrading” and “objectifying” to women, it was explosive enough….one of the Alas regulars (actually, Hugo) ultimately discovered the “review” site and privately (and publically) outed and busted Amp for his “hypocrisy” and not being upfront with his readers on the sale. 

Amp responded by publically revealing the details of his financial condition and why he did the sale, and all the inner conflicts he had about not just the sale but his antiporn beliefs.  For the most part, most of the readership of Alas, while a bit saddened and feeling more than a bit betrayed that Amp would resort to that alternative without publically hashing it out in the first place, nevertheless was willing to forgive the situation as a case of financial survival.

For the Antiporn Radfem Caucus; though, the revelations of Amp’s action were just the ultimate proof of his innate evil…showing once and for all that he was nothing more than a typical male, exploiting feminism to impose his misogynic, injurous agenda…if not an actual double agent for the “pornographers” and “pimps”. From pillar to post, they vowed never to support him again (as if they were that supportive to begin with in the first place); and that by doing this sale without their approval and without seeking alternatives (such as allowing THEM to buy the domain and convert Alas to a full blown man-baiting, antiporn radical site, I guess). Amp was simply showing himself as the sellout and patriarch and pimp that all “feminist men” (those who don’t totally pimp antiporn radfem ideology, that is) ultiimately are.

Naturally, Heart was the leader of the anti-Amp lynch mob; she got off a series of blasts at her blog in righteous condemnation of his “sellout”; but other well known antiporn luminaries such as W-W, Delphyne, Violet Socks (of Reclusive Leftist), Pony (who got off a particulary nasty crackback connecting Amp’s porn linkage with his posting of his daughter, all but calling him a pedophile), Ginmar, and Sam (of Genderberg) vented their spleens on Amp as well.

[Note: I’m not providing links to any of the detractors or the particularly nastier comments, since it’s my stated policy to avoid giving these….ladies any more of my bandwidth; however, you can reference either the Alas discussion at the thread here, or this blog, which contains links to the various blog rants pro, con, or indifferent.]

However, Amp did have his defenders and less hostile critics: such as Soopermouse, Kevin Andre Elliot,  Richard Jeffery Newman, Jenn (from Reappropriate) and a few others did express their understanding of Amp’s financial condition which prompted the sale; and did credit him for ultimately coming correct and reappraising the situation.  For his part, Amp has posted recently that he regrets doing the sale, and that he would do his best to be more forthcoming henceforth (and there is the slight chance that the sale might be voided due to breach of contract, since there may have been no warning from the buyer that he would do such linkage to porn).

As for my own take on this:  Well, far be it for moi, who is generally openly pro-porn (at least to the extent of its right to exist and being pro-free sexual speech), to jump into a battle between mostly principled anti-porn feminists; but I just don’t think that Amp deserved the ton of crap he received. 

First off, the principle of “My blog, my ules” comes into play; Amp paid good money for that domain, and as such it is HIS and HIS alone to regulate what happens there. It was on his graciousness that he offered the Radfem Caucus his bandwidth for them to preach and moan; and they have rewarded him with nothing more than potshots at his being male and not being pure enough in his hatred of porn….so I figure that they have no business dumping on him for “betrayal”, since he wasn’t on their side to begin with.  But then again, that’s par for the course with them…as amply experienced before.

Now, those more regular contributors of Alas do rightfully have a far better case of feeling aggrieved by Amp’s actions, mostly because he could have been a bit more forthcoming and open about his financial troubles back then, and sought their help in resolving the issues before making this sale.  There is nothing wrong with asking your friends for assistance in a time of need, Amp; and I’m sure that they would have been more than kind to help you out.

The bottom line for me is this: I am soooo glad that I will never have the noteriety to have to sell my domain name (although with a domain name like redgarterclub.com and my below the bottom site ratings, I can rest assured that no porn portal will be knocking at my door looking for deals). Then again, considering how pro-porn I am (tempered, of course, by my radical Left/feminist/libertarian socialist principles), that probably wouldn’t matter much to some people….ehhhh??

Give me some time to rest up a bit…then it’s back to the Boob/Burqagate smackdown.

[UPDATE: The folks at Creative Destruction have been kind enough to send me their link list for all the players and commentators on the Alas controversy; I am sincerely grateful and thankful to them.  See the second comment below.]

[Update #2: Since some of the links are broken; and the links are so many; I will repost them as a seperate entry….stay tuned.] 

On Boobs, A Boob, A Really Bad Burqa Joke, and Liberal Cultural Imperialism (Part One)

First off, my apologies for not blogging for a while…work and other stuff, you know.  I’m currently enjoying a week of paid vacation, so I’ll just take advantage of it for playing catch-up. 

Now, I’m wondering myself why it took me this long to add my penny’s worth to all the fireworks and water works going on over former President Bubba Clinton’s recent soiree with the Liberal Blogospheric A-Team, and the ensuing Cat 3 hurricane in Left Blogomania…but since everyone else in this freakin’ nation has had a say or fifty about it, then why not moi???

To give a abridged version of the whole story:

Bubba invites several of the lib blogosphere’s heavy hitters to his office in Harlem for a informal luncheon, basically to soften them up for Hilliary’s 2008 Presidential campaign, I’d guess.

One of the invitees happens to be a quite striking young woman named Jessica Valenti, who writes the Feministing blog.  And I do mean quite striking, too….though that should have nothing to do with her competence as a writer, now should it, gang??

Anyways, part of the soiree includes the obligatory portrait, where Ex-Prez Bubba looks all Presidential and all the participants put on their best grins for the camera…so that they can say to their blogging friends that they got up close with “The Big Dog”. 

Jessica just so happens to place herself right in front of Bubba.  Wearing a very casual and dressy and quite appropriate (for a lunch meeting with the former President) form-fitting blouse. 

The results are shown here (*from Jessica’s Flickr gallery):

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), Jessica (as do almost all women) happens to have…..well, what we in the human race call “breasts” ….and quite decent ones, too.  And the particular blouse she wore (although not in any way revealing, since no cleavage was shown), did manage to emphasize that segment of her anatomy more than the usual. (No big deal here, either, since she wasn’t there to flash or put out, just to represent her share of the blogosphere.)

Just as unfortunately, as you can plainly see, Jessica happens to be a brunette and decent looking. Combined with the setting, the form-fitting dress, and the subject of the honor, you’d think that it wouldn’t take long for some of our wingnutty whackjobss to put 2 and 2 together and utter those two words of doom: 

Monica.  Lewinsky.

And sure enough, here comes libertarian conservative “feminist” Ann Althouse, who has a real beef with Bubba for obvious reasons (like, she hates his policies and his ways with women).  First she comes out and attacks the whole shindig as mere pandering to a failed president (unlike the current President-Select, whom she thinks is just jolly-fine because he’s a grown-up, mature conservative family man…..his alleged drinking, cussing, and fussing to the contrary). 

And then, when some visitors to the blog decide to point out Jessica and the resembulance to Monica, she comes back for a much more detailed and vicious personal attack on Jessica (or at least, her boobs), claiming her to be nothing more than a Monica wannabe, a publicity whore, and a brainless slut who’s bringing feminism down to the “raunch” level. She even attempts to bring in the Feministing logo (a series of matching “mud flaps” featuring a sihoulette of a scantily-clad woman) as proof of Jessica’s (and in Althouse’s view, most liberal feminists’) lack of seriousness.

Needless to say, the feminist and progressive A-list blogosphere went up in righteous anger and rose up in almost unison to defend Jessica (and, it’s nice to say, Jessica herself smacked Althouse down pretty good herself); and rightfully so, in my word.  I mean, it’s not as if she went in there with full cleavage and short skirt and snapped her thong…she was there on serious business. Perhaps Althouse was just jealous that someone at least prettier than her (and obviously smarter, too) got to get close to the President she hated)…or maybe it’s just that old right-wing hatred of Clinton for coopting their agenda so well. 

But that debate of all-hawk and no-spit over the importance of Jessica’s boobs was a mere cover for another, far more substansial debate that was raised later on: the lack of invites to bloggers of color.  This was especially important regarding Clinton because (1) he was considered to be America’s “first (unofficial) Black President (amazing what playing the sax on Arsenio Hall’s show and playing alongside Grambling State University’s “World Famous” marching band will do for a President’s image….it might even cover up his actual record towards Black people, like his support of racist crime bills, executions and welfare “reform”); and because of the Harlem venue.

(To be fair, one popular A-list liberal Black blogger, Steve Gilliard of THE NEWS BLOG, posted that he would have declined on personal philosophy if any invites were given to him to meet and greet Bubba…but he did admit that he wasn’t invited, either.)

While it was mostly the outsider, more radical Black blogging community (including Brownfempower, Kevin Andre Elliott, Bint Alshamsa, and especially Blackamazon, who laid a particularly lethal strike on the pretentions of White liberals here), the fun actually started when Liza Sabater of culturekitchen used her blog to bring out the lily-white nature of the lunch klatch in Black Harlem and how it represented how privileged White liberals seem to take people of color for granted and use them as recyclable refuse to raise their personal ratings.

Unfortunately, the way in which Liza expressed her rage brought out the dander of some of the liberals in response; including a particularly nasty ad hominen rebuttal by someone named TRex (nee’ David Ferguson) using the Firedoglake blog (owners Christy Smith and Jane Hamsher happened to be two of the invitees at the Clinton lunch). Apparantly, TRex used his creds as a White gay man to tell off Liza and other supposed Black know-nothings on their notions of representation in the liberal blogosphere; and even got off some personal jabs at Lisa’s writing style:

“So, Liza, dear, before you go assailing your betters and making Jane stand in for every blond white woman who ever pissed you off, maybe you should head back to eighth grade English and, you know, learn to spell and to write in a linear fashion.” 

[That was the original quote…..since then, T-Rex has gone and edited it to remove the more offensive remarks….barely.] 

Uh, huh. Very nice of him to lecture a Black woman on her “inferior” writing style.  I’ll bet he says this for all the uppity nigg….errrrrrrr….Black women writers, too.

[And visions of all the crap that Nubian has had to endure comes to mind, too.]

Of course, this has a real history to it….because Liza had earlier whacked FDL for allowing a portrait of Fightin’ Joe (for the GOP) Lieberman altered in blackface (as a part of their hatefest against him for his Republican policies…..as if Black people were too stupid otherwise to oppose him on his merits). [Note: the original pic from FDL (and originally posted at Hamsher’s Huffington Post blog, have long since been deleted from both the FDL and Huff Post servers; but Slate.com’s John Dickerson did manage to cache that image for an article critical of that effort.

Now all that would have passed and gone and had been forgotten as the usual election year inaniety. It would have, too…except that here, from out of the dugout in porn liberal feminist left field, came Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon to pour some high-octane rocket fuel to the debate ….in her attempt to defend Jessica from the evil bad fundamentalist woman-hating neocons.  In her attempt to score some humor and some smack points against Althouse and her boob obsessions, Amanda decided to import the time-honored image of a Muslim woman dressed in a burqa as the symbol of what she thought Althouse and her haters thought Jessica should have been wearing.  To that effort, she enlisted the help of a regular Pandagonite, Auguste, to do some Photoshop magic reconstruction to the original Clinton blogger soiree, the result shown here being attached to a biting rant Amanda posted to her blog:

[Click to see the full image]

That may have silenced the Althouse crowd…but it created a literal firestorm of rage from both radical Arab and Muslim women bloggers and WOC bloggers, who saw not a lighthearted joke, but a gratituous insult and an appropriation and mocking of another culture’s (and another race’s) most precious religious symbol…not to mention the blinding of Clinton’s own role in the destruction of Muslims and Arabs (who in the Middle East mostly consist of people of color) as a means to score brownie points against other White elitist women. 

[A similar discussion had emerged earlier when the Tennessee Guerilla Women, a liberal feminist blogger collective, decided to launch a campaign for reproductive rights in the US  using the burqa as a collective symbol of women’s oppression (Operation Red Burqa)….and got strongly rebuked by Black and Brown feminists for abusing and appropriating that Muslim symbol in that way.  (This essay by none other than Bitch | Lab (who is not a WOC, but radical enough to support their struggles) exemplifies the latter position quite well. The latter came as a response to one of my earlier essays from my former blog defending TGW’s position.)] 

But back to the here and now….things quickly degenerated into a nasty Pier 6 brawl (wrasslin’ term) when some of Amanda’s defenders in the liberal (and feminist) blogosphere started biting back that the complaints of the WOCs were being “selfish” and amounted to “black nationalism” in their attempts to shame White feminists into submission to “racist tactics”. Two particularly acidic responses came from Lindsey at Majikthisse and a young man named Alon Levy, who even went as far as to break out the old “Islamofascist” card in saying that critics of Amanda were simply soft on the innate evil of Islam amongst women, if not active agents of “Islamofascism”.  There was even a nice rant posted to Alas, a Blog by a “Greenconscionse” which attempted to recruit people into the War on Muslims using radfem rhetoric (an excerpt follows):

We should do more than criticize, we should support this war, expand it into Iran and Saudi Arabia, blow up the patriarchy everywhere possible. Support the immigration of women to the US from any Moslem country without husbands or fathers, forbid the oppression of women by Muslims in this country. Call it slavery and act against it wherever we can. The boys shouted us down in 1972 and they will do it again except for the decent men – shout back. Better yet turn your back on them and reach out to your sisters in Afghanistan and if it ever gets safer to your sisters in Iraq.

[emphasis added]

Meanwhile, in the midst of all this, Amanda decided to make an effort to crawfish her way out of the controversy with an attempted explanation and apology for the burqaized Jessica image; unfortunately, some of the WOCs decided not to quite buy into it, because it didn’t (to them) address the fundamental issue of how liberal White feminists appropriated wrongly the image of a POC for their own selfish motives without even addressing their interests. This set off some of Amanda’s supporters even more, who publically implied that she should have never apologized in the first place and that the critics were just evil reverse racists who were simply attempting to call themselves off as saviors of the entire third world though the usual Mau-Mauing and guilt tripping.

And so, the matter stands up to date…with bruised feelings everywhere.

What’s my personal take on all this??  That’s for Part Deux, soon to follow.  Stay close….

BTW….Go check out Bitch | Lab; she has a whole collection of discussion threads on the entire controversy…far too many to link here…but this post and discussion will do as a start.

On Boobs, A Boob, A Really Bad Burqa Joke, and Liberal Cultural Imperialism (Part One)

First off, my apologies for not blogging for a while…work and other stuff, you know.  I’m currently enjoying a week of paid vacation, so I’ll just take advantage of it for playing catch-up. 

Now, I’m wondering myself why it took me this long to add my penny’s worth to all the fireworks and water works going on over former President Bubba Clinton’s recent soiree with the Liberal Blogospheric A-Team, and the ensuing Cat 3 hurricane in Left Blogomania…but since everyone else in this freakin’ nation has had a say or fifty about it, then why not moi???

To give a abridged version of the whole story:

Bubba invites several of the lib blogosphere’s heavy hitters to his office in Harlem for a informal luncheon, basically to soften them up for Hilliary’s 2008 Presidential campaign, I’d guess.

One of the invitees happens to be a quite striking young woman named Jessica Valenti, who writes the Feministing blog.  And I do mean quite striking, too….though that should have nothing to do with her competence as a writer, now should it, gang??

Anyways, part of the soiree includes the obligatory portrait, where Ex-Prez Bubba looks all Presidential and all the participants put on their best grins for the camera…so that they can say to their blogging friends that they got up close with “The Big Dog”. 

Jessica just so happens to place herself right in front of Bubba.  Wearing a very casual and dressy and quite appropriate (for a lunch meeting with the former President) form-fitting blouse. 

The results are shown here (*from Jessica’s Flickr gallery):

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), Jessica (as do almost all women) happens to have…..well, what we in the human race call “breasts” ….and quite decent ones, too.  And the particular blouse she wore (although not in any way revealing, since no cleavage was shown), did manage to emphasize that segment of her anatomy more than the usual. (No big deal here, either, since she wasn’t there to flash or put out, just to represent her share of the blogosphere.)

Just as unfortunately, as you can plainly see, Jessica happens to be a brunette and decent looking. Combined with the setting, the form-fitting dress, and the subject of the honor, you’d think that it wouldn’t take long for some of our wingnutty whackjobss to put 2 and 2 together and utter those two words of doom: 

Monica.  Lewinsky.

And sure enough, here comes libertarian conservative “feminist” Ann Althouse, who has a real beef with Bubba for obvious reasons (like, she hates his policies and his ways with women).  First she comes out and attacks the whole shindig as mere pandering to a failed president (unlike the current President-Select, whom she thinks is just jolly-fine because he’s a grown-up, mature conservative family man…..his alleged drinking, cussing, and fussing to the contrary). 

And then, when some visitors to the blog decide to point out Jessica and the resembulance to Monica, she comes back for a much more detailed and vicious personal attack on Jessica (or at least, her boobs), claiming her to be nothing more than a Monica wannabe, a publicity whore, and a brainless slut who’s bringing feminism down to the “raunch” level. She even attempts to bring in the Feministing logo (a series of matching “mud flaps” featuring a sihoulette of a scantily-clad woman) as proof of Jessica’s (and in Althouse’s view, most liberal feminists’) lack of seriousness.

Needless to say, the feminist and progressive A-list blogosphere went up in righteous anger and rose up in almost unison to defend Jessica (and, it’s nice to say, Jessica herself smacked Althouse down pretty good herself); and rightfully so, in my word.  I mean, it’s not as if she went in there with full cleavage and short skirt and snapped her thong…she was there on serious business. Perhaps Althouse was just jealous that someone at least prettier than her (and obviously smarter, too) got to get close to the President she hated)…or maybe it’s just that old right-wing hatred of Clinton for coopting their agenda so well. 

But that debate of all-hawk and no-spit over the importance of Jessica’s boobs was a mere cover for another, far more substansial debate that was raised later on: the lack of invites to bloggers of color.  This was especially important regarding Clinton because (1) he was considered to be America’s “first (unofficial) Black President (amazing what playing the sax on Arsenio Hall’s show and playing alongside Grambling State University’s “World Famous” marching band will do for a President’s image….it might even cover up his actual record towards Black people, like his support of racist crime bills, executions and welfare “reform”); and because of the Harlem venue.

(To be fair, one popular A-list liberal Black blogger, Steve Gilliard of THE NEWS BLOG, posted that he would have declined on personal philosophy if any invites were given to him to meet and greet Bubba…but he did admit that he wasn’t invited, either.)

While it was mostly the outsider, more radical Black blogging community (including Brownfempower, Kevin Andre Elliott, Bint Alshamsa, and especially Blackamazon, who laid a particularly lethal strike on the pretentions of White liberals here), the fun actually started when Liza Sabater of culturekitchen used her blog to bring out the lily-white nature of the lunch klatch in Black Harlem and how it represented how privileged White liberals seem to take people of color for granted and use them as recyclable refuse to raise their personal ratings.

Unfortunately, the way in which Liza expressed her rage brought out the dander of some of the liberals in response; including a particularly nasty ad hominen rebuttal by someone named TRex (nee’ David Ferguson) using the Firedoglake blog (owners Christy Smith and Jane Hamsher happened to be two of the invitees at the Clinton lunch). Apparantly, TRex used his creds as a White gay man to tell off Liza and other supposed Black know-nothings on their notions of representation in the liberal blogosphere; and even got off some personal jabs at Lisa’s writing style:

“So, Liza, dear, before you go assailing your betters and making Jane stand in for every blond white woman who ever pissed you off, maybe you should head back to eighth grade English and, you know, learn to spell and to write in a linear fashion.” 

[That was the original quote…..since then, T-Rex has gone and edited it to remove the more offensive remarks….barely.] 

Uh, huh. Very nice of him to lecture a Black woman on her “inferior” writing style.  I’ll bet he says this for all the uppity nigg….errrrrrrr….Black women writers, too.

[And visions of all the crap that Nubian has had to endure comes to mind, too.]

Of course, this has a real history to it….because Liza had earlier whacked FDL for allowing a portrait of Fightin’ Joe (for the GOP) Lieberman altered in blackface (as a part of their hatefest against him for his Republican policies…..as if Black people were too stupid otherwise to oppose him on his merits). [Note: the original pic from FDL (and originally posted at Hamsher’s Huffington Post blog, have long since been deleted from both the FDL and Huff Post servers; but Slate.com’s John Dickerson did manage to cache that image for an article critical of that effort.

Now all that would have passed and gone and had been forgotten as the usual election year inaniety. It would have, too…except that here, from out of the dugout in porn liberal feminist left field, came Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon to pour some high-octane rocket fuel to the debate ….in her attempt to defend Jessica from the evil bad fundamentalist woman-hating neocons.  In her attempt to score some humor and some smack points against Althouse and her boob obsessions, Amanda decided to import the time-honored image of a Muslim woman dressed in a burqa as the symbol of what she thought Althouse and her haters thought Jessica should have been wearing.  To that effort, she enlisted the help of a regular Pandagonite, Auguste, to do some Photoshop magic reconstruction to the original Clinton blogger soiree, the result shown here being attached to a biting rant Amanda posted to her blog:

[Click to see the full image]

That may have silenced the Althouse crowd…but it created a literal firestorm of rage from both radical Arab and Muslim women bloggers and WOC bloggers, who saw not a lighthearted joke, but a gratituous insult and an appropriation and mocking of another culture’s (and another race’s) most precious religious symbol…not to mention the blinding of Clinton’s own role in the destruction of Muslims and Arabs (who in the Middle East mostly consist of people of color) as a means to score brownie points against other White elitist women. 

[A similar discussion had emerged earlier when the Tennessee Guerilla Women, a liberal feminist blogger collective, decided to launch a campaign for reproductive rights in the US  using the burqa as a collective symbol of women’s oppression (Operation Red Burqa)….and got strongly rebuked by Black and Brown feminists for abusing and appropriating that Muslim symbol in that way.  (This essay by none other than Bitch | Lab (who is not a WOC, but radical enough to support their struggles) exemplifies the latter position quite well. The latter came as a response to one of my earlier essays from my former blog defending TGW’s position.)] 

But back to the here and now….things quickly degenerated into a nasty Pier 6 brawl (wrasslin’ term) when some of Amanda’s defenders in the liberal (and feminist) blogosphere started biting back that the complaints of the WOCs were being “selfish” and amounted to “black nationalism” in their attempts to shame White feminists into submission to “racist tactics”. Two particularly acidic responses came from Lindsey at Majikthisse and a young man named Alon Levy, who even went as far as to break out the old “Islamofascist” card in saying that critics of Amanda were simply soft on the innate evil of Islam amongst women, if not active agents of “Islamofascism”.  There was even a nice rant posted to Alas, a Blog by a “Greenconscionse” which attempted to recruit people into the War on Muslims using radfem rhetoric (an excerpt follows):

We should do more than criticize, we should support this war, expand it into Iran and Saudi Arabia, blow up the patriarchy everywhere possible. Support the immigration of women to the US from any Moslem country without husbands or fathers, forbid the oppression of women by Muslims in this country. Call it slavery and act against it wherever we can. The boys shouted us down in 1972 and they will do it again except for the decent men – shout back. Better yet turn your back on them and reach out to your sisters in Afghanistan and if it ever gets safer to your sisters in Iraq.

[emphasis added]

Meanwhile, in the midst of all this, Amanda decided to make an effort to crawfish her way out of the controversy with an attempted explanation and apology for the burqaized Jessica image; unfortunately, some of the WOCs decided not to quite buy into it, because it didn’t (to them) address the fundamental issue of how liberal White feminists appropriated wrongly the image of a POC for their own selfish motives without even addressing their interests. This set off some of Amanda’s supporters even more, who publically implied that she should have never apologized in the first place and that the critics were just evil reverse racists who were simply attempting to call themselves off as saviors of the entire third world though the usual Mau-Mauing and guilt tripping.

And so, the matter stands up to date…with bruised feelings everywhere.

What’s my personal take on all this??  That’s for Part Deux, soon to follow.  Stay close….

BTW….Go check out Bitch | Lab; she has a whole collection of discussion threads on the entire controversy…far too many to link here…but this post and discussion will do as a start.