Meanwhile, one of Obama's public health advisors told Bloomberg she expects the president-elect will reverse US policies that emphasize abstinence and monogamy within marriage in poor countries such as Rwanda and Uganda--policies that don't work in places where infidelity by men is nearly universal and where basic information about safe sex is in short supply.

Unfortunately, the same can't be said for some other reported short-listers for key positions in the Obama administration: Chuck Hagel and Richard Lugar, reportedly under consideration for Secretary of State, and Larry Summers, reportedly on the short list to head the Treasury Department.

Let's start with Hagel. Over his career in the US Senate, he's received a zero-percent rating from NARAL, reflecting the fact that he has consistently voted against abortion rights, birth control, and embryonic stem-cell research, as well as supporting failed abstinence-only education programs. (As long I'm talking about "interest groups" like women, I should note that Hagel opposes gay marriage, too.)

Lugar, too, received a 0 percent rating from NARAL for his rabidly anti-choice record. Along with Biden, he supported Bush's proposal to deny African agencies US AIDS funding if they so much as refer clients to family planning and birth control services. On issues that matter to women, these guys are both Republican throwbacks, not the change we need.

A brief note about Summers. In addition to his famous statement that women are underrepresented in math and science professions because the ladies just aren't good at math and science, Summers has expressed the opinion that "Africa is underpolluted" (a statement he made in advocating for dumping toxic waste in developing countries); has said that children choose to work in sweatshops in Asia; and does not believe in the wage gap between men and women.

According to Women's Voices Women Vote, women overwhelmingly supported Obama--particularly unmarried women like me, who went for Obama by a 70 to 29 percent margin. (Married women supported Obama 50 to 47 percent; unmarried women with kids supported Obama 74 to 25 percent.) The strong pro-Obama turnout among women demonstrates two things: 1) The hysteria that Hillary Clinton was going to "destroy the Democratic Party" as silly women voted with their vaginas, not their brains, was dead wrong (as Melissa McEwan notes here); and 2) The new administration needs to pay attention to us. Surely there are candidates for these important positions that take women's rights--our right to birth control, our right to medically accurate sex education, our right to equal pay for equal work, and our right to choose--more seriously than these three.

If you read through the whole thing, which I strongly do not recommend, you'll discover that what Shaw means when she says Palin was "raped" is that she was "watched and analyzed," her words "recorded, examined and dissected"... by women.

Sorry, Beth, but that word does not mean what you think it means.

LOVED the dress.

According to a study by the Times, women in the individual insurance market — the one McCain wants us to get our health insurance from if he becomes President — pay significantly higher premiums throughout their working lives than men do. In cases from Colorado to Florida to Ohio (swing states all!) women could expect to pay between 22 and 49 percent more than their male counterparts. [...] And, according to insurers, there's one basic reason: women use preventative care.

In general, insurers say, they charge women more than men of the same age because claims experience shows that women use more health care services. They are more likely to visit doctors, to get regular checkups, to take prescription medications and to have certain chronic illnesses.

Oh, the same insurance company apologists try out the whole load of shit that it's about the expenses of being the ones that push out the babies, but even in states that allow women to opt out of pregnancy coverage, women still pay significantly more. Like a woman in the article, in fact, I don't have medical coverage if for some reason my multiple birth control methods fail:

Crystal D. Kilpatrick, a healthy 33-year-old real estate agent in Austin, Tex., said: "I’ve delayed having a baby because my insurance policy does not cover maternity care. If I have a baby, I’ll have to pay at least $8,000 out of pocket.'

Marcia D. Greenberger, co-president of the National Women’s Law Center, also points out that, the differential in pricing based on gender, McCain's tax credit for purchasing health insurance — $2,500 for you single ladies out there — will actually erode in value faster for women than men.

In the meantime, insurance professionals have one good reason not to make insurance pools gender-neutral:

Cecil D. Bykerk, president of the Society of Actuaries, a professional organization, said that if male and female premiums were equalized, women would pay less but "rates for men would go up." Mr. Bykerk, a former executive vice president of Mutual of Omaha, said, "If maternity care is included as a benefit, it drives up rates for everybody, making the whole policy less affordable."

Oh, well, gosh, Cecil, we wouldn't want to deny men the benefit of really low-priced health care just so our health insurance, that covers of the furtherance of the species, is remotely affordable or obtainable! Have to keep that Viagra cheap for you! Luckily, the head insurance regulator in Maine — probably through her use of preventative care — has a few more brain cells functioning than old Cecil:

Mila Kofman, the insurance superintendent in Maine [where they prohibit gender discrimination in the individual insurance market], said: "There's a strong public policy reason to prohibit gender-based rates. Only women can bear children. There's an expense to that. But having babies benefits communities and society as a whole. Women should not have to bear the entire expense."

The McCain/Palin health care plan for women: No birth control, no abortion, and certainly no help for the kids you bring into the world because you shouldn't have been having sex in the first place and anyway children are a gift.

(As my friend Meagan said, "BTW Hasselbeck is supposed to be Reagan--NOT Christian Bale from Newsies.")

I am starting to resent how much of my attention The View demands these days.

The most worrisome thing about all this? Spiers describes her vision as "Maxim for women." Let me be the first to say: GROSS!

Speaking of feminism: there's apparently a little online kerfluffle about this poster:

Palin Look-A-Like Strippers Vie For Title

Winner Gets To Go To Washington For Inauguration

LAS VEGAS -- There has been no shortage of Sarah Palin imitators since the Alaskan governor became Sen. John McCain’s vice presidential candidate.
But Thursday night brought a new twist for Palin look-a-likes.
Tina Fey is enjoying new-found celebrity status playing Palin on Saturday Night Live. What’s good for Fey is also good for dancers at Club Paradise Gentlemen’s Club.
It was uncanny how some glasses and a little bit of makeup transformed some Las Vegas dancers into Palin look-a-likes....

This is fitting. Palin's role in the election was wrought and is propelled by sexism (see the piece in this week's New Yorker about how she got on the national radar because a bunch of conservative magazine gentlemen visited Alaska on a cruise ship and thought she was hot). She wears red patent fuck-me spike heels. Dudes love her. Does her failure as a tactic—as a distraction, as human Viagra for the GOP—signal the failure of sexism or its success? The latter: She's set smart AND sexy women back immeasurably by being a goddamned cartoon.

According to analysis of data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics for individuals 25 to 61 years old, female-headed households have twice the likelihood – 13.5% - of seeing a 50% greater drop in their income than male-headed households’ probability – 6.6% - of such a drop. The probability of a major income drop for female-headed households has risen in the last two recessions.

Female-headed households are at a distinct disadvantage in recessions because they have fewer savings to draw upon. In an analysis by Harvard Professor Mariko Chang of the net worth of all unmarried women, he found that their median net worth was $12,900 – less than half the $26,850 for unmarried men. He found that the wage gap is the primary cause of this inequality of wealth – accounting for 39% of the disparity for never-married households and 18% of the disparity for divorced households.

More than half of all poor adult women - 54 percent - are single with no dependent children. Twenty-six percent of poor adult women are single women with dependent children

For more on the wage gap, see the Center for American Progress's October 2008 report, The Straight Facts on Women in Poverty.

Anyway, amid all the Obamamania and panic over Prop. 8, it's easy to overlook another important election going on in South Dakota: A vote on whether to completely ban abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or to protect the life of the woman. Even if McCain--the guy who put mocking air quotes around the "health" of a woman, to indicate he thought health exceptions to abortion bans allow frivolous abortions--loses, reproductive rights everywhere are still threatened by measures like South Dakota's. The proposal, if enacted, would force women to bring pregnancies to term even in cases where the fetus will be stillborn; put doctors at risk of criminal charges because of extremely vague language defining a woman's health; and would force doctors to file a report stating that their patient was raped, including the name and address of the rapist, to criminal authorities before they could use the rape exception. The argument for this, cited by Feministe, is that "if it is truly a case of rape or incest, we’re doing a disservice to society if we don’t do that,” according to one of the ban's proponents. It also requires the doctor performing an abortion in rape and incest cases to take DNA samples from the woman and the fetus, to prove that the pregnancy was really the result of rape or incest (and, anti-choice proponents claim, to help prosecute rape and incest cases.) The supposed argument for this latter requirement is that rapists use abortion to cover up their crimes. Prove paternity, and you've stopped the rape or incest.

Cara at Feministe effectively eviscerates both arguments. The first:

Firstly, shifting the burden of reporting from the victim to the doctor would only change who the victim must report the crime to. She would still have to provide all of the relevant information needed to file a police report. It’s the same exact process. Also, if police are actually going to try to catch the perpetrator based on this report, as Ridder emphasizes, they are certainly going to want to talk to the victim at some point anyway, meaning that any potentially traumatizing line of questioning isn’t going to be avoided. It further bears noting that the trauma many rape victims experience from reporting isn’t necessarily due to treatment by police, but treatment by their family, friends and community. [...]

Additionally, if this new fabulous method of rape reporting is so much less traumatizing to women, why aren’t these really concerned activists working to give this right to report to a doctor instead of police to all rape victims? Should a victim have to be impregnated by her rapist to access the supposedly least traumatizing form of reporting? I’d think not. So, could the issue be that these people don’t actually care at all about rape victims, but are really concerned with how to most effectively restrict their access to health care?

As for the last quoted sentence from the immensely compassionate Dr. Ridder, what exactly is he insinuating with the words “if this is truly a case of rape or incest”? Because if and truly imply that a victim might be lying. Certainly, that’s not doing any favors to his claim that reporting a rape to a doctor is far less traumatizing than reporting directly to police. Then he moves onto how not reporting a rape is doing a disservice to society.

The fact is that victims don’t owe us anything. I’d like to see more victims report rape, but first we’re going to have to create a society where those victims can reliably find compassion and a fair, non-rape apologist judicial system. The answer is not to force women to report. Women who choose not to report do so for their own reasons, usually very logical ones, and they are not doing a disservice to society with that choice. How about we start looking at the rapist who is doing a disservice to society by raping people, rather than pointing fingers at the victims who they’ve made too fearful to report?

And the second:

As for the anti-choice arguments, there is an inherent logical fallacy here. If rapists in cases of ongoing abuse, like incest, are using abortion to cover up their crimes, doesn’t that mean that the rapists are therefore forcing their victims into having abortions? If this is the case, then surely under this law, rapists would just stop forcing their victims to get abortions, and would instead force the victims to hide the pregnancies or blame them on someone else, make them to carry to term, give birth, and then surrender the baby for adoption. You know, just like in pre-Roe days. It would only make sense for rapists to stop using abortion to cover up their rapes when they only way to obtain an abortion is for a rape to be reported, so they’d find alternatives to ensure that the reporting still doesn’t happen. Simple stuff. [...]

Clearly, those supporting the ban don’t care about those slutty women who got pregnant from consensual sex and whether or not they hurt/maim/kill themselves with illegal and unsafe abortions — but surely they care about making sure that harm doesn’t befall rape victims, right? That’s what they want the public to believe, and this is why no one ought to buy it.

Over two excellent posts, Jen, one of the many wonderful women I met while in SD, talks about her own rapes and what the SD law could have meant for her under different circumstances, and why forcing her to report would have been so cruel. In a world where rape survivors are routinely mocked and laughed at simply for telling their own stories — and I should know — it’s downright sadistic to force women to tell their stories simply so that they don’t have to give birth to their rapist’s child.

Daily Kos recently added the South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families, which is fighting the ban, to its Orange to Blue fundraising list--an indication, perhaps, of how important this fight is not just for women in South Dakota but for women (and those who love them, or fuck them, or just don't want them to be forced to have kids) everywhere. You can also donate directly here.

And at those times, Feministing, a cheerful and indulgent milking goes a long way toward keeping a your partner content. But for the record: the advice I gave WWM applies to same-sex relationships and to straight relationships with a low-libido male and a frustrated female. Please make a note of it.

Iran has announced plans for a new car designed specially for women.

Its features will include automatic transmission, parking and navigation aids and a jack for changing tyres without getting grease on your chador.

Iran's biggest car producer, Iran Khodro, says it will come in a range of feminine colours and interior designs.

Other features are proposed to make it easier for women when they are doing the family shopping or taking their children to school.

A car that affords the woman? No, this is not what the Iranian engineers have in mind. Their car is not about woman as such but a faulty knowledge of woman that's reinforced by a cracked perception of them as simple ("its features will include automatic transmission, parking and navigation aid") and inherently vain ( "a jack for changing tyres without getting grease on your chador"). Our initial interest is disappointed.

Dressed in skimpy boy shorts and see-through mesh tops, about 50 women tried out Friday for the area's newest football team — the Seattle Mist.

The league format will be an eight-game season, with the East and West champions meeting for the famed Bowl during the 2010 Super Bowl in Miami.

Twelve women will be named to the initial squad tonight. The remaining members will be named later. They'll be thrown into Football 101, given a massive book of terms to learn the game, then hit training camp in June.

"Yeah, it's sexy, but that just draws the viewers," said founder Mitchell Mortaza, 34, of West Hollywood. "You've got to keep them, and the fan base has to respect it. Because of that, you're going to see girls that are beautiful, but athletic, and take it seriously."

I wonder if these were the kind of viewers Mr. Mortaza's "girls" were hoping to draw?

Lingerie football: Titillating lecherous, elderly construction workers since 2005!