I ran across an interesting article by Libertarian feminist Joan Kennedy Taylor (whose articles I have often admired) today giving a critical view on why so few women are involved in the Libertarian movement, citing many Libertarians’ reflexive antifeminism and the movement’s marginalization of women’s issues, as well as hostility by Libertarian men when criticized on these grounds. She advocates that Libertarians work with and try to reach out to mainstream liberal feminists. Well, I think she errs in defining radical feminists as the enemy – I think that radical feminists (especially those that are, well, anarchists/anarcha-feminists) are by and large going to be far more amenable to the argument that male-dominated government is hostile to women’s interest, than the average liberal feminist is going to be. Unfortunately, for the time being, even self-proclaimed Libertarian feminist groups (such as Wendy McElroy’s ifeminists online community) remain mostly oppositional in nature: they set themselves up as Libertarian feminists and then spend most of their time criticizing other feminists for not being Libertarian enough—rather than forging more respectful alliances between Libertarians and feminists. I hope that Joan Kennedy Taylor’s article may be the first step in the right direction towards that goal.

Commodification ahoy: State House leaders in South Carolina recently told a Boys’ State class that the money saved through financial aid from the state lottery program could buy a lot of beer and girls [Feminist Majority Foundation News Wire]. Gee, with that attitude (and other events of overt sexual harassment) what a surprise that South Carolina ranks lowest in the nation for women holding statewide office.

Salon Politics reports with barely-concealed glee about George W. Bush’s slide in the polls from 60% approval ratings to 53% approval ratings from his first hundred days to now. Well, this bodes well for Democrats in 2002 and all, but the real question is: why are half the American people still supporting this idiot? He lost the popular vote, he may have lost the election, he put into place the most Right-wing cabinet of the past 70 years or so, and he’s pushing an agenda that looks like The Beast From 1982 (or 1994). The answer of course is that newsmedia soft-peddled the President while simultaneously providing a smokescreen by slagging Bill Clinton for several weeks after he’d left office. I remember watching an episode of NBC Nightly News shortly after the inauguration that ran a misty-eyed piece pointing out the similarities between George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan (W. is, in fact, a conservative! He does, in fact, favor tax cuts!), immediately followed by a segment entitled–I kid you not–ClintonWatch on the latest tidbits of the Presidential pardon fiascos (and I don’t mean those pardons of nonviolent drug offenders in federal prisons or of 1970s leftist activists).

Damn that liberal media.

I went to see A.I. today. The film was visually stunning and had a strong, if often sappy and very Oedipal plot line. I decided it would be a good time to finally get around to reading this intriguing article from Salon on the depiction of robots and mechanical intelligence in science fiction, and how it reflects our need to define ourselves in opposition to computers and technology. The mechanical intelligence of science fiction is usually either (a) docile servant, like Robby or Asimov’s robots, in which case it serves (for the male scientist-engineer) as the perfect substitute for women and for the proletariat, or else (b) hypermasculine and threatening because it is so ruthless and instrumentally rational and physically powerful and therefore a danger to humanity, like SkyNet or HAL, because it has violated its expected slavelike position. The futuristic robot acts to express both the hope and the terror of the male bourgeoisie.

People who know my reading tastes know that I absolutely adore Andrea Dworkin. Therefore I took a great interest in the Guardian’s publication of an article by Louise Armstrong declaring Andrea a true feminist icon much more so than the pop-glam roster offered up by Elaine Showalter. Armstrong argues that Dworkin’s power continues to be that she is entirely media-unfriendly and therefore her presence is (unlike, say, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s) unsanitized, dangerous, and polarizing. Which is precisely what a radical opponent to male supremacy ought to be. She may not be widely liked, but she will not shut up and she keeps people talking about male violence and its pervasiveness.

Great line for the day: I laughed out loud when I read

So strong a signifier has Dworkin’s name become that it is dragged in, higgledy-piggledy, whenever the speaker/author wishes to dump poo on advocacy with which he/she disagrees. I have seen her name yanked in out of left field, in the New York Times, for example, to say that an author displays an Andrea Dworkin-like attitude toward the genetic alteration of apples.