Back when I was in college in the 1970s, women not shaving their legs was still a kind of daring thing (let them get hairy? Not conform to established standards of social grooming?). And one which annoys antifeminists now and then, as “hairy-legged” is a perpetual put-down—as I’ve mentioned before, “feminists are ugly” is time-honored proof that they shouldn’t be taken seriously.
Not only has that cliché stuck around, in a way it’s gotten worse: now not shaving the groin is just as much something to laugh at. I first noticed this in a preview for Younger, a TV series in which a 40something woman poses as 23 to get past age discrimination; at one point she’s in a gym locker room with genuinely younger Hilary Duff and when Duff sees she’s unshaven down there, she’s horrified. Then when TYG and I caught Mockingjay Part 2 this weekend, a clip for another movie has one woman ceaselessly mocking her buddy for having pubic hair.
I knew beauty/grooming/fashion standards are arbitrary, but seriously? This is the hill they want to mock people on?
•A man uses the Lifelock credit-monitoring agency to track his ex-wife’s activity, by taking out an account in her name.
•Various Chrome extensions can track everything you do with Chrome. And Yahoo Mail has shut some mail users out of their accounts for using Adblock.
•Human Rights Watch says Saudi Arabia is leading a coalition in Yemen against rebels and 2,500 civilians have been killed. So let’s not sell them bombs.
•Digby compares the case of a black guy shot in Chicago with a drunken white guy who threatened cops and was talked down. As Slacktivist says (don’t have the link) it’s not that the white guy should have been shot, it’s that it gives the lie to We Had No Choice But To Shoot. Likewise we have an anti-Islamic activist whose threat to “confront” Muslims attracts little media attention. If he were Muslim and confronting Christians? At the link, Digby points out the Planned Parenthood shooter in Colorado has been described as an occasionally violent “gentle loner” which is not how the media characterize non-whites. Oh, and right-wingers want you to know the attack was definitely nothing to do with anti-abortion views or conservative politics.
•Whether or not Trump is technically fascist, he’s certainly dictatorial. And he’s encouraging and feeding on the general unease about Syrian refugees. Digby links to discussions of how protesters have been assaulted at Trump rallies, and Trump’s declaration that if we waterboard innocent people, they probably deserved it anyway.
•Walmart uses a defense contractor to spy on employees.
•No, the Paris attacks are not Edward Snowden’s fault.
•The democratic, freedom-loving spirit of America can never be broken!—except when you have judges legalizing gay marriage, that could be the tipping point! Quite aside from that dubious conclusion, as pointed out in the comments at the link, the writer blithely ignores things like slavery and Cromwell’s Puritan dictatorship that don’t fit the democracy-and-freedom narrative.
•I will give Ben Carson credit for calling the Colorado Planned Parenthood attack a hate crime. However he goes on to say that we have to dialog despite extremists on both sides who want to destroy each other … because yes, there have been all those pro-choice shootings of right-to-life leaders and the bombing attacks on crisis pregnancy centers—oh, wait, no there haven’t.
•According to a lawsuit filed by the city of LA, Wells Fargo used a variety of unethical practices to turn clients into fee-generating machines, for example opening unwanted added accounts, charging customers with account fees, then sending them to collection if the fees put the customer into the red.
•A travel-data analyst says airlines have improved their on-time arrival rate by exaggerating the time the flights take when the schedule is set. Airlines disagree.
