The Wo! Front

The American blogosphere erupted over the weekend into something that has now been dubbed “Boobiegate”.

According to one Ann Althouse, an American legal blogger of dubious recognition, a woman ought not to have boobs when going to meet a former president. Yes, that’s right, leave them at home gals. And a woman sure as hell shouldn’t have boobs if said woman is a feminist, because feminists shouldn’t have boobs or be attractive. That is the domain of conservative women only.

Read on.

Jessica Valenti of Feministing fame got invited to lunch with the former President Bill Clinton with various other liberal bloggers. The group had a group picture taken (below) in which Valenti is standing directly in front of Clinton, slightly at an angle so as not to block him.

Jessica then became the butt of Althouse and her readers’ intern jokes, and then it turned nasty when Jessica responded to other commenters questions of “Who is the Intern directly in front of him with the black hair?” with “The, um, ‘intern’ is me. It’s so nice to see women being judged by more than their looks. Oh, wait…”

It just spiralled downward from there with Althouse accusing Jessica of posing in the picture to which Jessica replied with “It’s a picture; people pose.” Althouse then came back with:

Jessica: I’m not judging you by your looks. (Don’t flatter yourself.) I’m judging you by your apparent behavior. It’s not about the smiling, but the three-quarter pose and related posturing, the sort of thing people razz Katherine Harris about. I really don’t know why people who care about feminism don’t have any edge against Clinton for the harm he did to the cause of taking sexual harrassment seriously, and posing in front of him like that irks me, as a feminist. So don’t assume you’re the one representing feminist values here. Whatever you call your blog.

This is a really interesting comment from Althouse considering she proceeds to commit the cyber equivalent of sexual harrassment to Jessica and eggs her commenters on to do the same.

Althouse writes a follow up post entitled imaginatively: “Let’s take a closer look at those breasts.”

In which Althouse shows exactly how she’s not the sharpest tool in the shed (if the previous comments didn’t tell you that already):

Making this colloquy into this new blog post, I actually click over to Jessica’s blog, and what the hell? The banner displays silhouettes of women with big breasts (the kind that Thelma and Louise get pissed off at when they’re seen on truck mudflaps). She’s got an ad in the sidebar for one of her own products, which is a tank top with the same breasty silhouette, stretched over the breasts of a model. And one of the top posts is a big closeup on breasts.

Sooooo… apparently, Jessica writes one of those blogs that are all about using breasts for extra attention.

Soooo…apparently Althouse isn’t very bright. The mudflap girls, if you visit Feministing, are giving the finger. It’s called irony my friends. And the “closeup on breasts” is an ad for a feministing tank-top.

You get the picture. Feminists shouldn’t have breasts. Cut them off immediately if you exceed an a-cup people.

Althouse still continues to assert that she’s the real feminist despite her continuing harassment of Jessica:

Then, when she goes to meet Clinton, she wears a tight knit top that draws attention to her breasts and stands right in front of him and positions herself to make her breasts as obvious as possible?

Guys love breasts. I think Jessica knows that quite well. And I think for all her gasping outrage, she’s thoroughly pleased to get this attention.

Yeah, she’s asking for it isn’t she Althouse.

This is Althouse knocking Jessica down a few levels, as Jessica says:

I found a couple of other posts like it–talking about the way I looked–and it was really upsetting on a personal (and political) level. But this thread in particular turned kind of nasty.

You know, I was psyched to be invited to this lunch and was feeling pretty honored. But then things like this remind me that no matter what I do or accomplish, because I’m a young woman all I’m good for is fodder for tacky intern jokes and comments that I don’t “represent feminist values” because of the way I posed in a picture.

What’s worse is that this comes from other women, other progressives, and other supposed feminists. How are we supposed to move forward as a movement if we’re busy bashing each other with this ridiculousness?

Zuzu from Feministe put it well too:

Althouse wasn’t the only one trying to put Jessica in her place; as I also mentioned, there were any number of commenters across the progressive blogosphere that made comments about Jessica’s fuckability. They didn’t know who she was, or why she was there, but they sure as hell felt free to speculate that it had something to do with sex.

[…]

In other words, they smacked her down for being so uppity as to think that she had the right to be there.

There’s something perplexing about blogwars- it allows people to be extremely insulting, as if people in cyber land aren’t real people. Some of the things that are said are just downright nasty and I have a hard time imagining it would be said in ‘real life’.

Having said that the Australian blogosphere doesn’t really ever get that exciting. The closest we have in rivalry here are Tim Blair and Tim Dunlop, that I know of anyway. Tim Blair does send his goons out into attack mode on other people’s blogs at times which is why I’m not linking him.

Blogwars continued:

I wanted to tie this in to another fallout that I came across the other day because it demonstrates how women like Althouse do quite a bit of damage by expressing their anti-women sentiments for their own fifteen minutes of fame. And despite being wrong continue to plug the anti-woman agenda for their own ends.

In the context of Boobiegate, Althouse brought up this:

On the subject of blog comments, Dr. Helen has this post, about how people went too far in the comments after she wrote something on the subject of women, here. A woman had lashed out with sudden, physical violence against a man who’d been trying to pick her up in a bar. Her husband blogged about it, and the commenters there cheered. Dr. Helen said — aptly — that if the sexes had been reversed, we’d be vilifying the man.

I came across the blog she’s talking about the other day when someone linked to a post where Sci-Fi writer John Scalzi (the husband of said violent woman), blogged pictures of bacon taped to his cat. (This was on his to-do list for the day).

Besides the cat post I found the post wherein he praises his wife for standing up for herself in a bar when she was being harassed and grabbed by a persistent drunk quite interesting in the backlash it caused.

Note how in the above quote Althouse still tries to give readers the impression that it was an unprovoked, malicious attack? Even though I’m sure she knows that the man sexually harassed, intimidated and grabbed Scalzi’s wife throughout her night out drinking with friends.
Scalzi writes:

She basically ignored him for most of the evening, until the point where the guy actually tried to touch her. At which point she shoved him up against a wall, jammed her arm into his throat and said, “I have had enough of you being rude and disrespectful toward women. The next time I see you, you will be polite and show respect.” At which point the dude started blubbering all sorts of drunken apologies.

Scalzi got widely scolded for his wife’s such unlady-like and unbecoming behaviour. Lesson: women aren’t supposed to stand up for themselves if they’re being harassed.

Dr Helen enlightens us with this:

If a man lost his self control and put his hand to a female admirer’s throat, think of the repurcussions. He might be arrested for assault or at least thrown out of the bar.

Obviously the two situations are completely incompatible. The intimidation caused by women by drunken, potentially dangerous men who are hitting on them is hardly felt by the opposite sex. People were praising Krissy on John’s blog because of the way she handled the power dynamic by turning around a situation in which she was in a weaker position. By asserting her power over this man, and not acting like a meek, timid victim, which I’m sure is what these guys get off on, she startled him enough for him to leave her alone and perhaps he’ll think twice about doing the same thing to another woman.

Dr Helen took issue with the man apparently only trying to touch her. Scalzi since clarified that he did indeed grab her. But still Dr Helen harps on about violent women and societies’ alleged hypocrisy in her post about Boobiegate:

Well, the irony to me is that the same left-leaning “feminist” types fawn over, and show support for Bill Clinton–one of the biggest gropers and sexual harrassers around–all the while shrieking that if a man tries to touch them in a bar, all bets are off and physical violence will follow.

Krissy’s reaction, like the whole Clinton bloggers lunch shouldn’t have even been an issue, Woman reacts with moderate force to man harassing her, good on her. Woman wears nice clothing and poses for a picture with Bill Clinton, so what? It seems pretty simple to me but women like Althouse and Dr Helen continue to search for the 15 minutes of blogger fame by barracking for the mysoginist team. Not ok. They should just do things like stick bacon to their cat. That’s a sure fire winner.