SelectSmart has often had fun little political ideology tests that place you somewhere within the good old domains of conservatism, liberalism, libertarianism, etc. But they never had one for assessing feminist ideologies. So, I decided to make one. The result: the nifty little What Type of Feminist Are You? selector. It currently does its best to rank your affinity for radical feminism, socialist feminism, anarcha-feminism, liberal feminism, eco-feminism, libertarian feminism, womanism, girly "femme-inism," Amazon feminism, and anti-feminism.

It has some problems. For one SelectSmart only lets you put in 24 questions, and as a result I don’t have enough questions to distinguish some of the kinds of feminism. Also, SelectSmart’s methods of scoring are kind of limited. For example, I have a question "A free market economy benefits both women and men," meant to distinguish between libertarian feminists and radical feminists, socialist feminists, and anarcha-feminists, and indifferent to liberal feminists, Amazon feminists, etc. But I can only say what a question scores in favor of, not what it scores against, so somebody who disagrees that "A free market economy benefits both women and men" is marked as being equally likely to be liberal, radical, socialist, womanist, etc. … even though they are actually much more likely to be radical or socialist. Because of the problems with SelectSmart, I may end up eventually creating another survey, either with CGI programming on eskimo or with another surveying service.

It was no surprise at all to me to find a reviewer declaring that American Pie 2 was crap [Salon]. But what level of oxygen deprivation does it take to declare that the first American Pie was "one of the sweetest comedies of the ’90s, and one of the smartest." Huh? I mean, American Pie was nowhere near as mean-spirited as some of the teen sex comedies of the 1980s, but what is? And in a decade that gave us Life is Beautiful, Kicking and Screaming, Bamboozled, The Last Supper, Man on the Moon, Bulworth, and more, I believe this review is a clinically diagnosable mental illness.

Jason Mallory, an awesome boy from Fort Worth that I met at Southern Girls Convention, tipped me off to a Left/Progressive journal in Bryan/College Station (home of Texas A&M) that published a good article of his on the rape of men in prison. I was doubly pleased to read the rest of Touchstone and find an article once again blasting the historical and political attempts to whitewash the Confederacy and pretend like the Civil War had nothing much to do with slavery. (It was all about states’ rights! States’ rights to… to… to have states’ rights!)

For further reading:

• GT 5/28/2001 More on pro-Confederate revisionism and the Confederate constitution
• 3/16/2001 Anti-Southern Bigotry and Elitist Yankee Faux Liberals

Not content with having the homophobic Defense of Marriage Act enacted at the level of federal legislation, a Religious Right group called the Alliance for Marriage has proposed a strategy to enshrine a ban on gay marriage in the United States Constitution. Not only would the proposed amendment trample on states’ rights to enable gay marriage where they see fit, but it would also destroy all laws which give gay couples the equivalent privileges of marriage, such as Vermont’s Civil Unions law. Although I have deep reservations about the idea of gay marriage and want marriage-privilege abolished rather than extended to lesbian and gay male couples, we cannot stand for this kind of overt homophobia and discrimination being put into the highest law of the land. As long as State-recognized marriages exist, the government should not discriminate on the basis of gender or sexuality as to who can have them.

Take action! Sign a petition urging elected representatives to Oppose the Federal Marriage Amendment Petition

A report in Roll Call reveals that CNN chief Walter Isaacson has been powwowing with GOP leaders to work on ways to attract more Right-wing viewers, whose news-viewing has been increasingly taken by Right-wing propaganda outlet FOX News Channel. Corporate News Network decides that its niche market in the moderate Right-of-center that passes for mainstream American politics is falling apart, and they now must do outreach to the far Right zealots as well. And so it goes.