What are you thinking about? An Open Thread August 3, 2009

What are you thinking about?  Reading?  Doing?  Anything politically making you happy?  Angry?

Some observations from this side of the blog:

1.  The Republicans continue their assault on the country.  Preventing health care reform and spreading the  idea that the president is not really an American citizen (“the birthers”) must be more  harmful than not.

2.  I’m taking the pledge:  I swear not to listen to any other conservative describe Sotomayor.  This is after hearing McCain who  is  “on the fence” about voting for her nomination.  Always out ahead of popular opinion, McCain??

3.  We can be grateful (goodness knows to whom) for the Willie Nelson/John Mellencamp/Bob Dylan concert currently touring around.  It lasts for 5.5 hours.  That’s a recession special.

4.  A video of Willie Nelson:  this is from another tour,  but still this year; he’s 77.  Including this is an example of how we are not men-haters!  That said, I have to apologize for the sound quality, which is seldom very good on privately taken tapes.

And here I thought we were the man-haters

Many thanks to the F-Word for setting me straight with their post on a genuinely fascinating study showing that non-feminists have more hostility to men. Why are they hostile?

Our work finds that, indeed, non-feminists believe in traditional gender roles such as men being breadwinners and women being caregivers. At the same time, these non-feminists actually appear to resent the confines of the traditional roles they advocate, which presents a paradox for women and men in traditional heterosexual relationships.

(Whenever I hear mention of the feminists-as-man-haters idea, I think of a neighbour who asked me if I hated men when I told her I taught feminism. When I said that I didn’t, she asked me “well, what do you do?” And, in a shockingly happy ending, she declared herself a feminist within 5 minutes.)